Old images wave to me from the Super 8 film. It was a happy time, a father and his four children sledding down a snowy hillside behind their home in Southwest France. "Maman!" they wave as the camera follows them in a blur. Down they slide, sometimes alone and sometimes doubled up. Then, images of the father, dragging the sled up the hill, over and over again.
I notice blue sky above the scene and wonder, what might I have been doing as a child on that same day long ago, under that same sky, a continent away?
Another reel of another day long since gone, and this time, it's Christmas morning. In every frame, the French father is looking down, puzzling over toy assembly, surrounded by kids. We are seeing this world through her eyes, the mother.
My father, too, probably spent that same Christmas morning assembling toys.
The reel flickers to an end and the French boyfriend smiles and says, "That is the life of P family," and I smile to see him dusted in happy childhood memories. I go to the window and spot the hill, the one made just right for sledding on rare snowy days. Happy memories happened right there.
I'm often struck by the stories behind old images of young families. It's the time before life happened and things perhaps got tricky. I'm drawn to those old images, wondering about the in between, from marriage to divorce, from birth to old age, from innocence to reality. Sometimes it was a path well chosen, and sometimes not. It's a bit voyeuristic in an Ebenezer sort of way.
There was a room in the old French house, the only one on an in-between floor. It was here that the oldest brother died, a few years before I viewed those Super 8 films. The door was always closed, as if shuttering off a life. In this room is where one of the boys on the sled ended up, dying of AIDS as young man. We sneak a peek and see the bed, dark like a tombstone. I was years away from being a mother, but my heart ached in sympathy for the mother and for the father.
The French boyfriend didn't last, and I moved on. Then, a few years later, a devastating call at work. "Did you hear about our friend?" the caller asked. "He took his life."
And the world fell from under me. It wasn't remorse over the demise of our brief relationship. It was more that I was standing at the abyss of loss beside his mother, feeling her pain.
Once in a great while, she creeps into my mind, this mother, and I wonder how she has been coping, if she has been able to cope. Now that I am a mother, I cannot fathom the sadness she must feel at two sons lost.
There is another son, and a daughter. Hope.
I've never known the details of how her youngest son left this world. I only know it happened in the adjacent guest house, the morning of a significant birthday. His dog had been barking and then they found him.
Recently, I wondered if anything had been written about him. Memoirs can be therapeutic, did they write one, his parents? I don't know them anymore, and barely ever knew them at all, but still, I do remember. So I threw his name out into the Internet and got... nothing. I remembered his brother's name, it was either this name or that name and so I typed in both and there, on the screen, I saw him.
It was the same face peeking out of his surviving brother, a face I hadn't seen in 15 years. The resemblance was remarkable. But it was older and lined, framed by long loose curls and flourished with mauve spectacles. Him! Well, not him, exactly, but the other older brother, who was now a SHE, a middle-aged she.
The surviving brother openly identifies as transgender, and recently came out. I skimmed the article, written in French. Her parents don't speak to her, her children don't speak to her.
I know -- good for her for being true to herself. But I can't help but think about the parents. That's three sons lost. Indeed there was a daughter found, but not without some pain, I'm sure.
This is why the past is sometimes best left in the past. The reality might have been different, but in the way back, forgotten part of my mind, it was comforting knowing the parents had two happy, healthy surviving children.
I wonder how they cope with three sons lost? One lost to AIDS, one to suicide and one to the opposite gender role? The cumulative loss must be profound.
My mind races back to that reel, back to that time before the darkness. I go back to that snow covered hill and see children playing, their parents by their side. They are young and fresh-faced and alive. They have no idea how it will turn out.
Like the Ghost of Christmas past, I want to tell them all to take a different path. I want to hug the parents, for I know what's coming.
I realize this is a downer of a post, and not in keeping with my usual posts about children's museums and tooth fairies, but it's a story of childhood and life and the road one family traveled.
I wish the mother of these three lost sons well.
Image: Microsoft Clipart
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