There's a heart carved into his tree. It's been there since I was 16. I don't remember if we carved it or added to it. I just know that, on days like this, I feel like it's a metaphor for my own heart. I used to be able to stand on the roots of the tree and touch it...and in my mind it was a warm, beating, beautiful thing...
I know that I fell in love under that tree.
It's why we decided to bury our son's ashes under it - the heart where we fell in love, that would be there every year as a symbol to watch over him. Illegal - yes. But if you were hard-hearted enough to tell two broken-hearted teenagers they couldn't bury their son under a tree in a public park, you don't deserve to read the rest of this...
We were married under that tree.
It was silly - the weather was horrible, the ceremony having come down with an extreme case of Murphy's Law. A reluctant bride and a jittery groom. Family that refused to show, family that wished it hadn't...and family that believed that, somehow, the two kids who loved each other - really loved each other - would finally, in marriage, catch a cosmic break.
It would be funny, thinking of the actual outcome...but its not.
We made promises under that tree. To care for each other - always. To watch out for each other - always. To never forget. And then there were the secret promises. The ones I made in my heart, to my son, for his dad. The ones that, to this day, I have never broken. And then there's the one I had to...
Maybe that's the problem...and maybe that's why, on days like today, my heart feels broken all over again. I made a promise in tears, kneeling in the dirt, hands dirty from the digging, from patting the earth around the flower we added. We were so poor, and so broken, and we didn't know how to look at each other anymore. I'd made a new promise - to the man who would become my husband - at the height of my grief...as a way to apologize for what I felt (and sometimes still feel) was my failure. Women do it every day, some by accident...and for some reason my body failed me, and our child did not survive the night.
I remember they put me in the room, next to all the other mothers who'd given birth. They rolled me past the nursery so I could see all of the healthy babies, and put me in a room so I could hear them cry at night, as tears rolled down my face, and I hurt more than I've ever hurt in my life. We curled up on that hospital bed, alone in our grief, trying to be grown-ups, trying to understand how saying "everything happens for a reason" and "you're young - you'll have lots of babies" would make anything better.
The indignity afterwards. Of having to prove his paternity. Of being given a bag, with his clothes, a lock of his hair, the smell of him...the beauty of him. Of waiting months for the bag of his ashes. Of holding what was left of our love-child and not knowing how to move forward, how to do the things you should do when faced with a loved one's remains...
And knowing that you don't get over this. You never get over this. When you tell the why and people either jump into a similar story or tell you "oh! It's not that bad...imagine if..."
That doesn't help. Silence doesn't help. Awkwardness doesn't help. Simply imagine yourself in our shoes, look at your children and imagine if they weren't there, if all you had were their ashes...feel that. Then come at me about it. Because that, at least, will be honest...
I imagine that I left my heart in that tree. It's carved into it - forever, watching over my son. It is every part of innocence I still had about the world. The light. The good. It's why, when I think about having children today, there is a panic in my chest, a dizziness in my head... Eleven years and I am still scared to death.
I needed to write that out. To write it all out. The fear, the shame, the love, the hurt. Because for years I kept silent, for years I had someone next to me who felt it with me...but I no longer have that. Last year I allowed myself to be alone in it. Today - I push it out into the universe, consequences be damned.
I loved my son. Adrian Tai Rodriguez. Every inch of him. I love my son. Every day of my life. Every time I see a woman swollen with child, or touch a child, or hold a loved one close... I remember him. The love that made him. The love that carries his memory with me always. Hurt fades. Love...that love...is forever.
Happy birthday.
