“I Love You Dad”

This picture was taken just a few days after his daddy died.  He kept trying so hard to do the sign.  I was watching every single finger move up. Each one sticking to the other until they all separated correctly.   He was determined to make the, “I love you" sign.  

It took a few minutes.  I reveled in watching every moment as he maneuvered himself into success.  This sign was every day. This sign happened everyday.  Everyday was ‘I love you’ without words.  ‘I love you’ to dad, ‘I love you' to mom.  

He would even do two for, “I love you mom and dad.”  ‘I love you’ with our hands and with our smiles mean sharing a feeling. It’s a feeling that we all know without words.  He just smiled everytime we said it until this day.

Everytime we flashed that sign with our hands, the baby would smile and laugh and clap.  But, until now he had never tried to do it.  The night when he succeeded in doing it, we’d traveled back to the house we’d lived in before all this losing his daddy stuff happened.

We were in the one room with 2 sets of bunk beds. Before dad died, it was where our whole family would sleep even though we all had our own rooms.  We’d all sleep in the same room together.  When it was our whole family, the two oldest kids would sleep on the top.

Mom and dad would sleep on the bottom with the two little kids.  After Grant's death, I needed to come back to this space where I remembered our family when it was whole.  We called this room “the sleep room.”  Dad had always been here at night with us, all together in the sleep room as a family.  

Now, I locked us all in there while the rest of the house slept empty.  There was no life anywhere else in the house, but in that room where we all slept.  He learned the I love you sign there in that room.  For some reason it was that night.

It was as if he had to teach his fingers to make this sign.  He could no longer get by with the laughs and claps. He’d been watching the fingers of everyone around him. He needed to know how to do it himself.  

Grant’s missing hands taking the shape of  ‘I love you’ needed to still exist.  They need to exist where that didn’t exist before.  It now needed to exist in this baby.  Where it had existed before in dad, and now no longer did. 

It felt as if it were a moment of bringing something back that was lost.  Even though the loss of it hadn’t set in yet, we were preparing. Somehow our insides knew, and we were getting ready.  We were preparing for the feeling of the losses that were there.  

We were preparing for the jarring and devastating loss we’d need to face.  It was as if it would strengthen us to get through what already existed, but we were not yet prepared to handle. It was important.

We intuitively had to take steps to start the process of all what the loss would be in our lives. So as a mom and as my own soul needed strength and comfort, I took us to the place we were whole and strong and together from the recent past to recreate wholeness somehow. 

And my sweet son spent all his time, energy and effort intuitively doing his part of helping create the strength, wholeness and togetherness we were going to be needing and none of us had any idea how to create.