I missed my son’s voice this Christmas. Of all of us, Steven’s voice was the deepest. And that includes all the voices of our best-entire-family friends, the Eisenheims. Bruce (Steven’s dad) and the Eisenheim men (there are three) are all over six feet tall (just like Steven), but even so. In a room completely filled with Eisenheims and Trvaliks, you could still pick out Steven’s voice from the crowd. That’s how deep it was. Deep and resonant.
Even his laugh was deep. He laughed a lot.
That’s when I noticed it, actually. Christmas week, on more than one occasion, we did have a room completely filled with Eisenheims and Trvaliks. Plus some visiting boyfriends, girlfriends, partners. And sometimes, what a hullabaloo! We can be so loud, everyone talking at once and across the table in every direction! And the room is wonderful, boisterous, chaotic, literally rumbling with joy and yetat the same time I am thinking one voice is missing.
Grief is always sticking its nose in when there is a lot of Joy about. Because they are friends, these two—Joy and Grief. They literally walk hand in hand. I’ve talked this over with my friend Jenn T., who also lost an adult son. We think that Joy and Grief co-exist quite happily, even right at the same exact moment sometimes. That you must give each its due or things can get out of balance. Which would not be so bad if Joy wound up the winner, but Grief is a bully and packs a good punch so that’s the type of out-of-balance I mean.
A few times over Christmas week, the entire-two-family hullabaloo would break up into a “kid” grouping (louder) and a “grownup” gathering (quieter). The kids are, in truth, all grown-up twenty-somethings and create a respectable hullabaloo all on their own. It’s a symphony, listening to all their voices; for me, literally. It’s so beautiful when I’m listening to those voices and that hullabaloo—from a quiet, grownup-gathering distance, let’s say—that it makes me weepy. And that’s even from before Steven died. This Christmas, double weepy.
Last Christmas, the first Christmas after Steven died—well, there is a certain level of gritty learning-to-renavigate-the-known-world energy required in those early-ish days, along with missing your beloved one at the imprecise, insurmountable and somewhat savage, his-entire-person level. Missing Steven at just the deep-resounding-voice would have been impossible.
The reason I know Steven laughed a lot isn’t just from me knowing it. (He did laugh a lot around us, his family. Me (Mom), Dad, three sisters.) But other people also told me this. So many people told me about Steven after he died. Told me so many things that I didn’t know or that I wasn’t sure of. Like, for example, Steven was very happy. Steven was a very positive person. Steven had many friends and he wove them all together so they knew and loved one another.
People still tell me many things about him, and I always listen very carefully with my ears and my heart which sometimes aches and my eyes which sometimes go blurry with tears real fast.
But! Do not be sad! Those aches and tears are just all that love I am feeling with no place to go. And besides, it’s not all aches and tears. Sometimes it is hoots and hollers and belly laughs, because in addition to being a happy-friendly guy, Steven was also, at times, a lunkhead. A happy one.
This is, I suppose, something everyone wants to know about the people they have loved and lost. Were you happy?
It can be hard to wrangle the truth about this but I haven’t seen any evidence to the contrary so I am going to go with Yes.
There are other questions too, harder ones that come visiting at very odd hours, rudely, without knocking on doors and being invited in.
Like—Did you know how proud I was of you? Not like brag-o-matic look-at-all-you’ve-done proud. More like you-were-a-kind-person proud. More like you-were-very-brave proud. More like boy-you-were-really-loving-life proud.
Or—Did you know how much I loved you? Like, did you really know?
Or the ruinous—Were you frightened when you fell?
Funny thing is, I do occasionally hear him. Steven. I get the impression he is stopping by regularly to check in on us, making sure we are OK. The night after he died Steven came to visit my friend Deveaux, who is an avid seer of ghosts. (She even has photographic evidence.) He told Deveaux to tell us that he was sorry. To tell us, as Deveaux put it, that he “didn’t mean to break y’alls hearts”. I think he worries about us.
He sat beside me on a very late-night drive to New Hampshire a while back (I was driving his car after all), making sure I got where I was going safe and sound. I would look over and he wasn’t there but boy, it sure felt like he was. He was practically singing along with me to the music for Heaven’s sake; his playlist, so he knew all the words. Singing along in his deep and resonant voice. As it got later and the playlist ended, it was just the two of us, zipping along 93 North of Concord, New Hampshire—that part where the speed limit goes up to 70 and all you can see are stars and darkness.
And I am sure I imagined it, but I kind of might have heard him say, because I wanted so very much to hear his answers to those hard questions, I am going to go with Yes, Yes, and No Mama, Not At All.
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