Guy Oliver Speaks

It now occurs to me that, in all of these words so far, as I try to tell my son’s story, I’ve mentioned precious few words regarding my other two children. I was once counseled in the aftermath of Tim’s accident not to forget about my two children who remain.

Regarding the loss of a child, a seductive elixir asserts itself in which the focus tends to be on the one who left and to disregard the ones who remain. The pain of that loss can blind us to many things. The day-to-day difficulties our friends continue to experience. Things at work that require our attention. The needs of our spouses. But the most important potential casualty is that of children left behind who experience their own brand of grief.

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Standing in my ex-wife’s kitchen, talking with relatives, I thought to myself how we hadn’t all been together as a family in 20 years. There was a time when we had been close. Two brothers, two sisters, three children, and 14 nieces and nephews. At one time this had been my tribe.

In most cases, family is never not family but, as time passes, family is sometimes supplanted by surrogates. Ultimately we choose whether to adopt and to be adopted by others based on circumstance rather than blood. All of us but one left the sleepy berg of Mineral Wells and, in a functional sense, lost track of each other. We haphazardly kept in touch by phone on holidays and sporadically by social media. In the process, we each adopted surrogates who filled the gap.

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So much time and so many events have passed since those moments when my son, as a child, spoke to me, taught me, and reminded me of the important things. The decades have blurred the memories, which have become malleable thoughts that suit me, now, some 30 years later.

The challenge of writing the story of a life you knew well is the fact that at some point it ceases to be a factual continuum. The story devolves into a series of points, some of which refuse to obey the very chronology of time itself. We remember a thing decades after it happened and we can’t quite place it properly on the timeline next to the other spotty memories. We can’t be certain whether the thing came before or after our next memory as we have since organized it in our minds. Continue reading →