Blessed with Love

I have been blessed with love. My wife of 40 years, Ann. David and Jonathan, our grandsons, and their father Tim. Shannon and Derek, who chose me their dad. Bill, Shannon’s boyfriend, and his son C.P., who were close even before Bill and Shannon became involved. My cousin (third cousin on her mother’s side, just ask) Rochelle. Sandra, my late son’s girlfriend. My chosen sister Laurie in California. None of these people is a blood relation, but all are family. Family chosen by love.

Both my parents have died (or passed, passed on, beyond, over, whatever; the number of euphemisms for death is as big as the number for sex).

The big loss in my life, however, is my son Daniel who died in January of 1993. After Daniel’s death in an accident, we never saw him, never embraced him. We had his body cremated and kept the ashes (I loathe the word cremains, and spell check doesn’t even recognize it) for several years until we buried them with my father-in-law.

We have kept in close touch with Sandra, Daniel’s girlfriend when he died. At the time of Daniel’s death I was worried that she might be pregnant. Then I was sorry she wasn’t. But she has a new love, Mark, and we are happy for her because she’s happy and he’s a great guy.

We work to keep Daniel’s memory alive. We did not turn his room into a shrine. In fact, it was too painful to stay in the home where we lived together, and we moved from there. Both Ann and I kept a shirt in a plastic bag so we can smell him on them occasionally, probably pretty morbid and unhealthy, but everyone grieves differently and no one does it wrong. The boots he wore on a service trip to Appalachia we sent back with David to bury when he took the same service trip. Daniel’s friend Nick buried his high school ID on Mt. Olympus, much to our surprise because we didn’t know Nick had the ID.

When he died, Daniel was a fine arts photography student at Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY, home of Kodak. He produced hundreds of photographs in his year and a half there. These photos show him in self portrait, show his friends, show Rochester landmarks, show even the dog we owned at the time. And we have photos that we and his friends took of him. All of them reveal Daniel in some way.

We also have audio and video tapes of Daniel doing things nineteen-year-olds did in the late 80’s and early 90’s: in his band, on his skateboard, at a New Year’s Eve party a week before he died. Things like that.

But technology is outpacing us. Photographs fade. We no longer own a VCR. The audio tape player is over 20 years old and beginning to tire. The tapes become fainter and more distorted. If the player eats a tape, we’ll be out of luck, never able to hear our son again. We’re working on transferring the tapes to another medium, perhaps CD’s and DVD’s. Then in a few years we will have them transferred again, and eventually yet again, no doubt, as technology advances. With each generation they will become less accurate, and we will be less directly connected to Daniel. Not that the tapes we have are anything but a feeble representation of him now, albeit a representation that is better than nothing.

Yet it occurs to me that the fading tapes and the advancing technology are perhaps not a bad thing. Their loss is painful, certainly, but less sharp than fourteen – or ten or four – years ago. We have tried not to turn our son into a saint (and failed, no doubt; read on), because we know the only place Daniel can truly live is in the hearts of the people who knew and loved him. Every contact with another person influences us in some way, no matter how miniscule. And Daniel influenced a lot of people. A couple of his friends finished their educations because he would have wanted them to. Some are kinder people, because he was kind and they want to honor him. No doubt some are ornerier because he could be pretty ornery when he wanted to be.

We have family of all ages, genders, and races. They do not replace Daniel – nothing can ever do that. And they do not dilute our love for him. They enhance it. Our capacity to love these people stems directly from Daniel. From his capacity to love us and us to love him.

The photographs will fade. The tapes will disintegrate. But his legacy continues.