Quattro

Chanukah. Thanksgiving. Michael’s Birthday. Four years without Sylvie. Four years. Sylvie has not been with us for longer than she was with us. Dead longer than alive. Spencer and Ryan are 3. They will be 3.5 in April. They will have lived as long as Sylvie in April. Maybe then I’ll really exhale. I run through these kind of stats all day long. I think about Sylvie literally every second, like a buzzing in my ear. Traffic lights are the worst. There I have the opportunity to focus on really bad things. Then the light turns green and I snap out of it because I want to be present and “normal” for my family. All of our children are so different than Sylvie although Ellery looks identical to her. I try to compartmentalize my grief and anger because I am so grateful for Michael, Ryan, Spencer and Ellery. And their joys are my joys. I realize that Sylvie’s passing activated a duty in me which is to protect Michael from his own grief. I’m fascinated by Spencer and Ryan on a daily basis because their minds work so differently than Sylvie. I mean, they work different from anyone else’s, but my area of expertise of the four and under set is pretty narrowly based upon Sylvie. All of the kids have been sick for the past 3 weeks. I’ve spent countless hours at the pediatrician’s, at urgent care and the pharmacy. It has literally sucked up every single spare moment. When Michael was driving past The Doctor Is In last Saturday, I asked him to pop in with Spencer. He couldn’t. He can’t. He never will be able to. For Michael, it’s activates his PTSD. It’s a drag. He thinks I’m unsympathetic. I feel badly. I want to be more sympathetic but I’m too pissed off with spending all this time and energy and free time on taking the kids to get checked out. When we took Sylvie to the emergency room on 11/27/09, we had a really foreboding feeling. When Suzi Shelton’s “Ten Thousand Kisses” played in the car, we shut it off because it freaked us out and we drove in silence. I do NOT get that feeling when I take the boys or Ellery to the doctor. I think Michael does, however. The boys love tearing up our guest room. Big bed. Lots of books. Boxes filled with cool things like Sylvie’s jewelry, ballerinas, stickers. I found on the floor last week my folded index card containing the list of everything we packed up for Sylvie’s journey. In life and death, it’s not so much that Sylvie was a princess, she’s was like an Egyptian QUEEN. I was kind of shocked to find it, as if it was speaking to me in the same way that “Here Comes the Sun,” “Over the Rainbow,” “Fly Me To the Moon,” and “You Are My Sunshine” play more in random stores, b-side satellite radio stations and on television. I took a cue from my sister-in-law who once told my niece that she can see Sylvie when she closes her eyes. So Ryan tells us practically daily that Sylvie is in Heaven and then he covers his eyes with his tiny hands and says he can see her. I think he and Spencer imagine they are playing this great game of Hide and Seek with a very mysterious person. Their sister. Who they will never know. I imagine them growing up and telling their friends about their sister who died that they never met. And that their parents are a little crazy because of it. Ellery’s too young to factor into this with the exception that really and truly, she looks identical to Sylvie. When Sylvie passed away, a business associate and friend sent me a copy of The Little Prince with a note that it helped his wife during times of stress. I keep the card in the book as my bookmark and have spent countless hours reading and rereading it. Besides the allegories to loss, I really love the emphasis of engaging your child from their perspective. I never spoke to him again because I never returned to work for fear of having to talk about Sylvie all the time but I really owe him a call because he has no idea how impactful his kind gesture was. I don’t have an anecdote to wrap this up today because really, the fact I got to sneak in some time to write this is a miracle unto itself. Let’s just say that my Black Friday is worse than yours and in the spirit of Sylvie, I hope you buy lots of sparkly things.