Gumdrop Tree

Yesterday turned into a bit of a weepy sad mess. I started looking at photos of Sarah on my phone, the most recent ones, and thinking ‘This one was 19 days before she died.’ ‘This one was four months and eleven days before she died.’ Did she look as if she was detaching from us? Ready to leave? Eager to head out?

I don’t think so. She had a certain adolescent ability (and need) to tune us out these last couple of years and wasn’t always as joyful and effusive as she had characteristically been as a smaller child. Her affect was flatter from about age 13 and we worried that she might be depressed or in a lot of pain. We had a couple of visits with a neuropsychologist at Kennedy-Krieger who talked to her with our help, and his opinion was that she was more of an adolescent now and adjusting to a lot of school and friend changes with Middle School. He also recommended a different seizure medication because the one she was taking made people prone to depression, so we changed that.

She went on to really enjoy Middle School, meeting her boyfriend Danny and her really good friend Clay (Clay is a girl). The Pandemic managed to screw up the last part of 7th grade and all of 8th grade but she did fairly well with remote learning because she had her father on Zoom with her all day long plus a strong Middle School resource teacher, Mr. Kornfeld. Actually, I think all the kids in her classes benefitted from Max being around and I got a kick out of him sometimes answering their questions.

So yesterday I was just working myself up into a pretty bad state looking at pictures of Sarah, which is actually something I like doing. The thought that I will never see her face again overwhelmed me. A couple of weeks ago I picked up one of Sarah’s stuffed Minions (I think it was Otto) and he started playing a song, one that was part of our bedtime routine for Sarah. Polly the Beagle immediately looked to Sarah’s chair. She must have thought Sarah was back. I felt so bad for her. She can’t possibly understand what’s happened. That day must have been terribly confusing for her, with the rescue squad and funeral home people coming into the house and touching and taking away her girl. She didn’t like strangers getting too close to Sarah.

I was crying for most of the day and at one point I stood looking out the window. There’s a very large boxwood in our backyard, really huge. We call it the Gumdrop Tree. There are some old dead vines left on it and one looked like it had grown up into the sky. “I wish I could pull on that and bring you back down,” I thought of Sarah. If only it were that easy.