Morning

This picture isn't the one I'm talking about in this. It's just one I like.

I wake up early now.  I never used to.  In college, my roommate worked as a radio morning show DJ and woke up around four or five.  We used to joke that his day began when mine ended.  I scheduled classes late and spent more time without the sun than with it.  That changed by necessity in law school, and as I age the hour seems to keep creeping up on me.  I rise earlier and earlier, a habit my body now stubbornly clings to even on the weekends.

Morning is always the hardest time.  James is clearest to me in the morning.  Literally and emotionally, it’s the easiest time to find him. As the day goes on I get more easily distracted.  E-mails, texts, phone calls.  Anything you want to do and many things you do not want to do.  I have tinnitus, and my ears ring loudest in the morning, fading as the day goes on as the ambient noise provides a distraction.  James fades in the clutter of the day.  He’s always there of course, just in the background.  I think about him every hour.  But he is clearest in the morning.  The focus is sharpest and almost complete. 

As I go through my morning routine, with nothing to do but brush my teeth and stare at myself in the mirror, I catch myself thinking of him.  Lately, I think about him growing up.  I think about Saturday mornings and cartoons, of toy bats and what it might have been like to have a kid rather than a baby.  I wonder how he would have disrupted my mornings, breaking the silence of me standing in front of a mirror and brushing my teeth.  I’ve started turning on the shower before I brush my teeth, and if I’m honest it’s at least in part to break the quiet so I spend less time dreaming up scenarios like that.  The morning is the hardest time to distract myself.

Because I wake up early, I tend to go to work early as well.  Again, I prefer to be doing.  I am most productive in the mornings, again, because there are no distractions to keep me from doing the things I need to do.  Early this week, in a fit of early morning productivity I elected to clean out my desk.  I had not done so in over two years.  Two seasons worth of Christmas cards, two years worth of napkins I kept from to-go lunches because “that will probably come in handy” which did not come in handy.  Farther down, no doubt deliberately placed there, a whole series of condolence cards.  I’m not sure I’d read them before.  I do now.  They’re touching and heartfelt.  I wish I’d responded. 

Beneath those I discover something I do remember doing.  A whole set of James’ newborn pictures.  When he was born I asked the facilities guy at my office to install a bulletin board beside my desk.  I put all my James related memorabilia up on it.  His pictures, the Valentine’s Day card he made me.  The idea was that the board would continue to grow with James and keep him close during the day.  The pictures, all but three, came down the day I came back to work.  I just couldn’t deal with all of them.  I left the card.  The pictures went back into the sleeve and joined the heap at the bottom of my drawer. 

I take each one out of the sleeve individually, pausing for a moment.  Some have tape from where I attached them to the board or holes where I pinned them.  I’d never be so careless with pictures of James now.  It takes me until the fourth to start crying.  It’s easier to cry in the morning.  He’s wearing a knit hat, his hair peeking out from beneath the cap.  I remember the photographer who took them not being quite sure what do with all of his hair.  He’s swaddled and looking to the side, a dimple on his cheek.  His eyes look bluer than I remember.  “Who is Daddy’s best friend?” I ask the picture.  I used to ask James that all the time.  He’d laugh and laugh, especially if I made a particularly ridiculous face for him.  “Jamesie!” was always the answer. 

I spend a little while longer looking at it, long enough for the tears to dry, then I put the picture back up on the bulletin board.  I feel close to him, and the extra picture feels right.  The next day, I put up another picture.  I did the same thing everyday this week, always in the morning, until I filled up the board completely again.  It feels good to have more pictures of him.  I’m still not great with mornings and I probably never will be.  But I’m glad I least tried do something with that focus.

Thank all of you for your continued thoughts and prayers.

Running

After James died, I ran. I ran away from conversations, polite nods and eyes crinkled in sympathy. Sometimes when running I even faced them, mastering thank yous and polite handshakes before immediately changing the conversation subject, my aggressively ok facade offering an escape of its own. Just pretend it's not happening, I thought, and it won't. I ran as far away from these things because it seemed for a time if I ran fast enough, I could in some way manage to escape the roiling terror of the reality nipping at my heels, that in reality my son, whom I loved before all others, was gone. In his place there was nothing in a particular, a life indifferent at best. A solar system with the sun snuffed out, the planets carrying on as if nothing happened, orbiting a void.

But I got tired eventually. The hours in the day added up, and no matter how hard I tried, I could not fill all of them. The trouble with running is that you need somewhere to go, something to do. When I ran out of things to occupy my time, James inevitably filled the void. When something lingers in the back of your mind all the time, it takes very little to draw out. Four or five months after James died, I began to run out of steam. My distractions proved increasingly less effective. James started to creep out of the boxes I'd made for him in my mind, even as he did in life, popping up in unexpected places. An avocado popping out my sandwich, neatly sliced and perfect for his fingers. Television shows I used to "watch" with him returning to the airwaves, everything back from the summer but James. Holidays, over and over again. More blocked facebook feeds of kids exactly his age than I can remember.

It would be incorrect to say I stopped running. It would be more appropriate to say I collapsed, exhausted. My self-induced fog began to lift, and I saw the world clearly. I cannot say I particularly liked what I saw. The fragmented bits of my world matched up much less clearly, and with less purpose, than they had before. Having the entire context of your life shift suddenly and without warning is disorienting and not particularly pleasant. I spent a long time angry about that. I spent more time sad about it.

In the end, it settles. Not settles in the sense that it's ok, or not horrific in some way, but settles in the sense that it is not actively debilitating when it hits you. Loss of any kind, especially the loss out of order of someone you love, is not a wound that heals. Closure is an impractical and misplaced goal. James is not a torn ACL, something a surgery and a few months of rehab will set right without further ado. You live with it. Your only choice is how you choose to do that. Twenty years from now, I will still love my son and miss him very much. It is very likely that I will think about him everyday until the day I die. I can choose either for that to be the saddest part of my day or a bright spot. James never brought me anything but joy. I wouldn't trade having him, even for the short time we did, for the world.

I receive a lot of messages from people who are losing, or who have lost, their children. I cannot say I understand their pain completely. Each child, and each loss, is different. I would never presume to know their experience. People sometimes ask me what I did. So I thought I'd say. I'm not particularly proud of running. Given a chance to start over, I'd probably do a lot of things differently. Of course, no one chooses this in the first place.

Thank all of you for your continued thoughts and prayers.

Gray for May

I'm far too late in posting this, but May is Brain Cancer awareness month. The color is gray, as in gray matter. I tend to think brain cancer is rather underreported. Of course, I'm biased. That said, cancer is the leading cause of death of children under the age of 14 and pediatric brain cancer is the leading cause of death from cancer in children. Approximately 4200 children are diagnosed with a brain tumor each year. If you have time this month, tell someone about it.

Obituary

Here's a picture of James playing in his bouncy/multi-station playpen. I loved watching him play in this. It combined his two passions, slapping things and bouncing. The toy was made for much older children but James tried it out before the recommended age guidelines. He always soared well ahead of his various developmental targets, and this just seemed like another one. In retrospect, it's only fitting that he hit his milestones early, as he had so few to hit. I loved watching him play with this toy, Kara took a video of him watching the dogs fight from it. It's one one of my favorites.

A few days ago I looked up James' great-grandfather, my grandfather and James' namesake, James Edward Sikes, Sr. I tried a google search just to see what would happen, and much to my surprise, he came up on something called findagrave, which is possibly the most morbid website ever. There he is along with my grandmother, who died exactly a year before James. Kara was pregnant with James when she died, and one of the last things I said to her before she died was that I told her I was going to name my son James, after her husband. She could no longer speak, but she squeezed my hand and met my eyes for a moment, pleased. She died the next morning. I like to think they were waiting for James when he died.

Even more interestingly, along with the findagrave link helpfully letting the entire universe know where he is buried there's his obituary, fresh from 2003. I wrote it. I remember when I wrote it. Like James, he got sick all at once and died shortly thereafter. I did not arrive in time to be with him, which I regret. My brother and I were his only grandchildren. I remember welcoming my grandmother back at his house in after he died, when she and my father came home from the hospital. She buried her face in my chest and cried, saying over and over again that "He loved you so much." I never doubted that. I do not know why writing the obituary or giving the eulogy fell on me but it did, so I did. I did the same for my grandmother, and sure enough, there's her obituary as written by me, right alongside his. Interestingly, findagrave also serves as an impromptu geneaology site. I can click on my great grandfather, Arnold Larkin, the exception to the James rule, all the way back to James Franklin Sikes, my great-great-great-great grandfather. Perhaps more disturbingly, someone has taken the time to go to Sikes (as a rule, one should not visit Sikes) and actually take pictures of these people's tombstones. Somehow, the obituaries follow back all the way until James Warren Sikes, Sr., my great-great-great grandfather who died in 1925. The florid language reeks of 1925, invoking the silent call of the "death angel" to Sikes, Louisiana.

You cannot follow findagrave all the way from my grandfather to his son James Edward, Jr. to James Matthew to James Camden. I suspect that my father and I are inconveniently alive, but the process will be resolved following my death when I join James in Denton. I did not write an obituary for James. I buried him in the poplar casket we picked out a few days before, the one most like a little boy and least like a baby. I did not want to bury a baby. It seemed demeaning. He was a person. James was already playing with the big boy toys, afterall. Google reveals an obituary, a boilerplate web posting by the funeral home we hired when he died that gets my name wrong and provides dates for the service with a play lock letter background, to make clear its for a baby I suppose. I am sure they asked if we wanted to write one. I am sure we declined. I do not remember. I do not remember much about the days after he died. When I wrote my grandparent's obituaries, the trouble was always with punctuation. The appropriate way to write survived by, etc., etc. Semicolons or commas? A host of nieces and nephew. I'm sure I used that phrase. What would I say about James, survived by three Uncles, no cousins, five great-grandparents, four grandparents, and two parents? Just as well I didn't bother.

The act of the obituary celebrates. It memorializes the life of the deceased, referencing the accomplishments and the family- the survivors- of the one who has passed. In James' cases of course no such memorial exists. James died without survivors except for his ancestors. He died without cousins, siblings, or anyone of his generation. I rather think that's not the idea of an obituary, From these old ones, they give a path as to what happened, rather than what did not. Children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews. There is no movement in the opposite direction. 

Strange things like this pop up when you lose a child. The template fails you. I remember answering questions at the funeral home after he died. Education level? You actually just asked me if my eight month old son graduated high school? He did not. Yes, less than junior high. That sounds right. There's no place for it in the pantheon of grief, a fact reflected in all of the standard fare grief literature. Celebrate life, they say. How do you celebrate a life that never got off the ground? I wonder these things, and I wonder if I shouldn't have written James an actual obituary.

I wonder a lot of things.  To me, an obituary provides a bit of finality to the community, who may open up their Sunday paper and watch their acquaintances go, one by one, with all the details of life conveniently congregated in one place. With James, its more personal. Sometimes it gives me comfort to think of James with his family, my grandparents and Kara's. Other times I just feel bitter, wondering if we aren't a few obituaries or a findagrave link short. Mostly of course, I just miss him, playing and slapping the dials on his toy, fascinated by the different sides of it. You miss all of the small things. The big picture is too uncertain to dwell upon.

Thank all of you for your continued thoughts and prayers.

Recognition

You lose track of what other people see in your grief. The basic human cues designed notify you of strangeness, oddness, or different behaviors in others turn off completely. You draw inside yourself, unable to look far enough past your own eyes to see what the rest of the world might. You do not see what they see in you, or how they perceive what you go through. In the first month or two after we lost James, I seriously doubt that I ever thought for one minute about what the world might think of me, or noticed how people acted around me. That filter was entirely removed.

Lately though, the social part of my brain that picks up on these things is coming back. I'm noticing a new phenomenon. The most common encounter involves someone I have not seen in a while. An acquaintance of some kind, someone whom I would say I know of, but do not necessarily know. They would likely say the same thing about me. Someone perhaps three degrees of Kevin Bacon away from me.

First, a glint of recognition. Law function? Someone's birthday party? I know you from somewhere. Names filter in. Next, greetings. Hello, how are you, how have you been? This sometimes continues for a while, and then it starts. A slowly dawning recognition in them. It starts in the eyes, slightly wider, now with some insight. Their posture shifts slightly, they become more attentive. Ah, I think to myself- they know. Then, out of nowhere, regardless of what we're talking about, they interject "I'm so sorry about what happened to your son." Pity frames their eyes now, the tone of voice softens. I never know what to say, and usually settle on thank you. It seems polite. The conversation usually ends shortly thereafter.

When James was sick, I wrote about "cancer eyes." These were the eyes people, from hospital staff to strangers, would give us when they found out James had brain cancer. Pity, mostly. The looks I get from these acquaintances are very similar "condolence eyes." Like cancer eyes, I have little patience for them. That's not to say I do not appreciate people feeling bad about what happened to James. Of course I do. but pity does not interest me. To me, that undermines the experience, it defines James only by how he died and ignores the rest of his life. I prefer sympathy, or empathy. If people want to talk about James, I'm happy to do so. People have told me they were sorry and added something, talked about it. Told me what he meant to them, or about themselves. I like to hear that. If they're just going to say the words for the sake of saying them though, I'd rather we skipped the formality.

I know this may sound harsh, that people just want to be kind. I know they're trying and do not mean anything by it. Still, I think it's important to recognize what's good to say and what's not. So I suppose I'm trying to say that. I am glad when people talk about James. I like to remember him. I love him. What I am not interested in is people saying something just for the sake of saying it. I did not notice it before, but I do now.

Thank all of you for your continued thoughts and prayers.

Football and a Fundraiser

You can't really tell in this picture. but James is wearing a Houston Texans onesie. It's the day we took him home from the hospital and we were getting ready to watch the game. As you can see, James was not particularly pleased about the sports affiliations I bequeathed on him.

One of the blogs about the Texans I used to read regularly pre-James is hosting a draft party on Friday that will benefit James' fund.  The party will be at 360 Sports Lounge in Houston on Washington Avenue at 6:00 P.M.

For those of you unfamiliar with the NFL, the draft is the process each year in which teams select college players to play for them next year. It's a big deal, especially for teams like the Texans which have historically been bad. If you're in Houston, feel free to drop by. Below is something I wrote for them. I'll warn you that some of it will only make sense if you're a Texans fan.

Though you probably haven’t noticed, I’ve been away for a while. Over the summer, my infant son developed brain cancer and passed away. I’ve been somewhat occupied.

My son was born on a Friday. My wife went into labor around midnight the night before, and our son joined us ten hours later after an emergency c-section. That Saturday, he watched his first football game. My duly maligned, long suffering Baylor Bears beat the University of Texas. I considered it auspicious, as it had been about a decade since we beat Texas in Austin. My son wore an outfit I’d purchased for the occasion, his very first clothes. My little bear. That Monday I slipped him into a Texans onesie I’d bought as soon as we found out we were having a boy and we watched the Texans play the Colts. They lost. I told him not to worry and apologized, not for the last time, for bequeathing my fandom upon him. For his first birthday party, my wife and I planned a tailgate party, to coincide with that what would have been a football Saturday.

Instead, he son died on a Saturday, 15 weeks shy of a year. We buried him on a Wednesday. Four months away from a tailgate and his first birthday. A month before he died, he was mastering the art of crawling and biting, applying the four teeth he’d acquired to anything within striking distance. Then he started throwing up and wouldn’t stop. We went into the hospital with what we assumed was a summer bug, a precautionary measure our pediatrician insisted on. Because he’d been throwing up, we thought we’d get some fluids and go. We were there for the next two weeks. In fact, we only left twice in the next month, both times for less than twenty-four hours.

No virus caused my son’s illness. Instead, a vicious tumor was lodged in his brain, tucked neatly between his brain stem and and cerebellum. An atypical teratoid rhabdoid tumor. It’s a rare tumor, the odds are a bit like winning the lottery in reverse. He was throwing up because of the immense pressure the tumor’s swelling created. A surgery removed 95% of it, the first step in what promised to be a long journey. We hoped a year of chemo would get the rest. The odds were bad but trending in our direction over time.
We never got to chemo. The tumor returned less than two weeks after the surgery, stronger and bigger than before, expanding its reach to new parts of his brain and his spine. The doctors said he never had a chance, that they had never seen a tumor so aggressive in their careers. We took him home and he died three days later in my wife’s arms. I held him until he went cold, and walked him out to the minivan the funeral home sent. It was tailor-made for such occasions with a child seat in the front seat. As if I’d ever allow my infant son to sit in the front seat of anything. I almost asked them to move him but decided that would somehow be more awkward. I bought a new car solely to avoid the possibility of a child in the front seat, an SUV with the capacity to sit three car seats in the middle seat.

I last commented on BRB two days before he got sick. Afterwards, it just fell by the wayside along with other habits and hobbies that seemed snatched from another time or another person. I followed the lockout with the casual interest of a fan who cannot avoid headlines but doesn’t care to dig. I’d long been amongst the contingent of fans that believed the NFL would find a way to slay its golden goose. It reflected my basic cynicism about the sports business model. The end of the lockout challenged my assessment- a surprising, if not robust, display of competence.

Football and I never got along to begin with. My father, grandfather, and even great-grandfather played, all for the same intermittent power of a high school team in the deep south where our family spent the last few centuries. Think "Friday Night Lights" but with pine trees. My Dad’s team went to the State Championship, but he didn’t play, the victim of a broken collarbone. My Mother’s high school (or rather, the Catholic boy’s team affiliated with her school) actually beat them, a fact she still believes entitles her to bragging rights. But my father and I, until recently, did not always get along. We had vastly different personalities. I never felt compelled to emulate him, while he never understood why I so stubbornly resisted pleasing him or anyone. We both had good points, but none of it mattered. I did not play. My brother did, a broad lineman like my father. My high school experience revolved more around anti-social endeavors. I never even attended a game.

College gave me a second chance at fandom. I had a choice between Baylor and UT. I went to Baylor because the campus was prettier in my opinion and because UT wanted me to submit applications for all sorts of subsidiary programs that I was much, much too lazy to complete. I also wanted to get the hell away from everyone I knew in High School and they all went to UT. Bizarrely enough, stumbling onto the Baylor campus and into the worst college football school in the Big 12 somehow suited me. Baylor would not win. You could reasonably expect a front row seat in the section of your choosing, the better to watch the massacre. Football became easy shorthand to make new friends and represented a common language I quickly picked up. My freshman year, Baylor beat Kansas. You laugh, but it was their first Big 12 victory in three years. My hallmates tore down the goalposts and carried them triumphantly the few miles back from the stadium to our dorm’s common room (one of the least of the Baylor football program’s many deficiencies is that it has not had an on-campus stadium in over 75 years). I loved it.

Because Baylor was so awful, the euphoria when we won was exceptional. Something appealed to me about rooting, often hopelessly, for the perennial underdog.
Fortunately for my nascent and masochistic fandom, football returned to Houston the same year I left for Baylor. Like the Bears, the Texans were not a very good football team. They were often a completely irrelevant football team. They lost in innovative ways. I felt right at home rooting for them. So began my relationship with the Houston Texans. My family picked up season tickets a few years later--my first game was the “Bush Bowl." Texans-related news browsing became a staple of my law school study breaks. Like many of you, I made the winding journey from the Chronicle to BRB. In my case, first to DGDB&D, which for some strange reason was at one point linked to from the Chronicle's website, and from there to BRB. I probably lurked for a year or two before I began commenting. Once I did, I was fortunate to join a community of equally obsessed, the long-suffering Texans fans. Nowhere else in the universe could you find people willing not just to watch DeMarcus Faggins “play” football on a regular basis but to discuss the particular horror of that experience. It was like a support group for people abused by Richard Smith and Frank Bush. I loved it and spent the next few years wasting far too much time browsing the comments section. But for life, I’m sure I would’ve enjoyed last season with you all. We sure as hell earned it.

My wife and I have created a fund in James’ memory through the Communities Foundation of Texas to help research rhabdoid tumors. As I said before, rhabdoid tumors are an extremely rare form of tumor. They were only recently distinguished from a similar but less malignant form of brain cancer, thanks to genetic sequencing of the tumor. As a result, treatments are still evolving. The positive side of this is that in the last few years there has been progress. Our goal with this fund is to help facilitate those efforts. Donations are tax deductible. Anything you can do is great. If you can’t give anything, that’s fine too. Either way, thanks for reading and thanks to Tim and BRB for doing this.

Reason

This is James from St. Patrick's day last year. He's on his second outfit of the day. We took him to the Greenville St. Patrick's day parade. Neither Kara or I are from Dallas, and neither of us had ever been to the parade before. Spoiler alert, but it's probably not the best venue to bring your five month old to. Wait 21 years, then try again.

It's funny how days like that stick in your mind. We got James ready early, but despite living less than a mile from the parade site had no idea where the parade was. Much to my bewilderment but probably appropriately, Kara insisted that James wear his sunglasses. He looked incredibly cute in them, his gummy smiles complimenting the frames. James had these big beautiful blue eyes that I always thought very striking. Kara and I both have blue eyes, but while mine are grayish and somewhat muted Kara's are a lively and almost turquoise color. It was one of the first things I noticed about her. James' were an odd, icy blue color, a combination of the two I always found striking and insisted took after my own. They really did not, I think I just possessively wanted at least some part of him to take after me, as otherwise he so strongly resembled Kara. The sunglasses made him look so different, like a whole new boy. I kept the picture as the wallpaper on my phone for months afterwards. I replaced it with one taken shortly before he died that's still there, patiently waiting for something important to happen, though nothing as important as James ever seems to.



But back to the parade. We tried the wrong part of Greenville first, a part which was blocked off, but not for the parade. It was blocked off for a temporary, holiday inspired relaxation of Dallas' open container laws, a block wide conflagration of drunken revelry, Bourbon Street for a day. The officer politely directing to us to the correct location gave James and us long looks, which should have been a sign. It was not. Before our first exit from the car to swing and miss and the wrong location, James made a huge mess and we had to change to his second outfit for the day. We tried again farther up the street and finally succeeded in finding the parade. Vast throngs of drunken revelers littered the streets and all seemed quite appreciative of James. We found a spot in front of the lingerie emporium (classy!) by Baker's Ribs and settled in to watch the parade. It was fun, but probably would have been more fun if I'd grabbed a few beers beforehand. There were other babies there, all like James completely oblivious and content to watch the adults with quiet bewilderment. James found a spot on my shoulder and we watched the sponsored floats make their past us. James was never fussy about crowds or loud noises, equally happy falling asleep in his room or at  crowded parade. After a few hours we made our way bck to the car and home, one more experience checked off our Dallas bucket list.

That was over a year ago. It's strange the details that stick with you. I could not tell you what we did the next day, or what outfit James wore the following Wednesday, but for some reason I remember with almost perfect precision every moment of that parade. I remember the way James' head felt on my shoulder. I remember the toys we gave him to play with and the bored way he surveyed the proceedings. I remember the party-goers in the high-rise office building across the street, making use of their office location in what must be the most enjoyable day of the year in that office. I remember where we parked, on University that I did not yet realize turned into Trammel and therefore offered a more direct path to my house. I remember the sunglasses I wore, Ray-Bans that I'd step on and ruin a few months later. I remember each of the outfits we changed James into as he casually destroyed each in turn. I remember the commentary I delivered to him as the parade drifted by, and my pointless explanation to him that he was just Irish enough to celebrate. We left and went home.


I sometimes wonder when the tumor arrived. I wonder if there was an exact moment when the cell mutated and why it happened. What caused it? I wonder how we didn't notice. It's a silly thing. ATRT and James' ATRT in particular represent one of the most virulent pediatric brain tumors around. Given how quickly James' tumor regrew after his surgery and the fact that his CT scan two months before his diagnosis was clear, it's almost certain that James' cancer did not arrive until shortly before his death. It did not fester inside of him for months before it manifested, it arrived quickly, debilitated him, and killed him.  There was nothing to notice before it was too late, because in James' case as soon as it happened it was too late. We just didn't know it.



Still, when I think back to days like the parade I catch myself wondering if it was already happening then. This is irrational, but it's still there. There's nothing rational about grief. The rational part of your mind is designed to collect data and translate that data into an answer. Grief defies the this kind of reasoning. There are no patterns to discern, neither deductive nor inductive logicleads to an answer. The only piece of data is death. There is no logical explanation.


Snippets of memories fill the void instead, disjointed and out of time that the mind cannot help but try to work into a narrative. But there is no narrative. There's only what happened, and what you do with that. There's no overarching theme or unifying theory of survivorship that links it all together in a neat little package. Instead, there are just memories like the parade and a thousand others, snatched out of chronological order and playing on loop. There was a time when I tried to categorize these, and obsessed about the whens and ifs I outlined above. I'm a bit better about that now. The thoughts are there of course, but I find that in isolation the memories are more enjoyable, that the memory of holding James on my shoulder on a March afternoon doesn't have to link into a larger narrative. It can just be that, and the simple joy of it need not suffer for everything that happened later. There are thousands of memories like that, and each has value on its own. There's no sense diminishing each by trying to make them all matter in the story of his death, because that's not the bigger story. The bigger story is James himself, in all his uncomplicated wonder. Of raising him and loving him. The end of the story is just that, the end, it's not the morale.

Thank you for your continued thoughts and prayers.