The Gray Area

Last weekend we traveled to upstate NY for my cousin's wedding. We planned to take the ferry from Delaware to NJ and drive up the Jersey shore into NYC to visit some of our old haunts before going on to the wedding. When we originally found out about Sully, I wanted to cancel this trip along with the rest of life, but slowly the fun of planning a trip and thinking about something else became appealing. My mind was mostly on the trip though and not the wedding.

I realized a few days before leaving that even though we had processed so much regarding Sully, I didn't know where to start with the people we would see at the wedding. They would be in the 'gray area' that we hadn't really dealt with much. We know now how to talk with our community about this who is walking the road with us, and we know how to answer strangers that we will never see again, but what about more distant family that we will continue to see, but only once or twice a year? Did they know or not and what would they say as several of them were pregnant also.

The answer is that almost no one mentioned it - either asking in ignorance or in knowledge - which was really our hope in our hearts... we thought. In a very suprising way, it was somehow almost sadder to not talk about him. This has left me very confused about how I want to deal with this phase of life, but certain that Sully is such a big part of me that I do not want this to 'just all pass' and be back to normal. Somwhere there is a craving to talk about and share this huge and intense part of my life, but I still don't know how to do it.

Oddly, at the wedding, it was not the other cousins and guests who were pregnant that made me the saddest, but the relationship of my cousin who got married and her siblings. You see, there are four of them (2 boys and 2 girls) spread out from 26 to 36 that have been extremely close all their lives, they come together for holidays all over the country, they share inside jokes, they can laugh at the flaws of their parents, and they love each others kids like only aunts and uncles can do. This was the kind of family dream that lead us to the decision to have a third. The image of our kids in college and career years coming home to a house where love and encouragement had sent them into life prepared and with countless threads woven between them that would always draw them back together throughout life, even after Heidi and I were gone. But Sully will never know that though his shadow will always be following behind Ella and Zane in every day on the playground and in the uneaten portions of every holiday dinner.