Hanging Onto A Sunday Morning

I am lying in a pool of sunlight with a newly arrived New Yorker, reading an article about virtual assistants and luxuriating in the warmth and the light of LA.

There's a quality to the light that attracted and kept John Baldessari living and working in Los Angeles, and while the quote from him I'm thinking of escapes me the qualities of the light do not.

My wife is jumping rope outside, the faint soundtrack of Wait Wait Don't Tell Me enabling me to acoustically pinpoint her unseen whereabouts with surprising precision.

My daughter is asleep in the pelagic slumber that only the constant hum of hormonal machinery during adolescence permits - her body is exhausted from being renovated from within. I'd like her to know that she will never sleep this soundly or unencumbered again, but some lessons can only be experienced to be learned.

From the room next door, my son virtually attends Zoom Sunday school. A sweet high voice gives an amber tint to the room, and I am struck by how pure his voice sounds.

We are in quarantine, and at this particular moment, I am probably his best friend and he is certainly my closest male friend.

We read together, play strategy games together, he seeks me out during the in-between moments of distance schooling, we check the real estate listings together on Redfin (he wants to see images of the properties, while I gently implore him to look at numbers before photos). Because he can't regularly hang out with another 1o year old boy, and because he's a 40 year old man in a 10 year old's body (as I was), he hangs out with me.

Ours is an intense companionship, and I am elated that I get to experience it right now and already a little wistful that it can't possibly last.

His voice will deepen, the door to his room will be closed more than open and he will seek fellowship among his peers instead of his parents.

In not many years this house will empty of the bickering, laughter and high jinks that occupy most of our bandwidth.

This morning over coffee I picked up an alumni magazine and checked the obituary section. A brilliant professor of medicine was remembered for his numerous contributions to the early detection of cancer. He had died in his 50s of cancer. The irony and the loss to humanity were great, but they took a back seat to a single devastating sentence: Predeceased by his son who died at age 16 of cancer.

That sentence encompassed the professor's drive for early detection, his remarkable career collaborating across disciplines and the broken heart he must have nursed to the end.

My med school mentor revealed early during my medicine subinternship that he'd had a son who shared my name, his eldest, who died as a toddler from an astrocytoma (a type of brain tumor). It was difficult for him to explain to his other children the significance their phantom sibling held for him, why they always observed the birthday of a child the surviving siblings had no memory of having known.

Parenting seems to involve a great deal of loss when it goes splendidly and everyone is healthy:

• Loss of prestige in the eyes of your children as they recognize your shortcomings.
• Loss of influence and control as they gain independence.
• Loss of understanding as they define themselves in contrast to you (I know I'm hung up on this point, but it feels acute. A relative who has a lovely relationship with her adult children once described the period of adolescence as having "an alien planted in your family who considers you the enemy.").
• Loss of control as they exert greater autonomy and assume greater risk in managing their day to day affairs.
• Loss of shared points of reference and shared spaces as they separate their lives from family life and pursue a path of their choosing.

The prospect of life proceeding according to plan can feel overwhelmingly sad at times; the thought of a plan derailed by the death of a child is inconceivably cruel.

Which brings me back to this Sunday morning. From the downstairs sanctuary of my office, where I've typed these few words, I intend to return to the light and warmth above.

My daughter awakened and sought me out as I was writing. It felt wonderful to be looked for, to be someone she wants to share discoveries with and be seen by.

I try to keep track of the small victories.

My wife and I have decided we will take the kids to get ice cream to go from our favorite parlor this afternoon, then bring it to a nearby park to enjoy it outdoors.

Today will be a good day, in spite of this third surge of COVID. There will be tickling for no good reason, a game of speed scrabble, vegetarian chili for lunch, reading more chapters of The Dark Is Rising, a call to the grandparents.

There will still be opportunities to think about loss. I will remind the kids of a beloved cousin of my father's, dead almost a decade, on what would have been his birthday.

But right now, I want to hang onto this Sunday morning.

The sun is out, and I have shutters to open and compulsively adjust so that the upstairs living area is warm enough to wear shorts by this afternoon.

I've got a hot shower waiting for me, and it's high time I get out of the cycling outfit my daughter has deemed highly embarrassing, my son just plain weird.

Feeling tethered to the present, I'm going to acknowledge the possibility of future losses, and then move past them.

There is too much good built into today to spend time worrying about the possibility of a sad tomorrow.