My daughter’s high-pitched voice is typical for someone her age: it drips like honey so damn sweet, some days I could eat her words. But when she recently said, “I want to make a gift for Grandma and Papaw,” it was the resolve in her voice—a drive well beyond her years—that really caught my attention. “I want to make something they can see from heaven,” she said.
The words hit like a gut punch that re-filled my body with the same sadness I’ve been pushing down for what feels like eons. Think of a video game character low on life force receiving a sudden surge of energy; now, imagine that energy is fueled entirely by grief that never truly diminishes.
And no: this sadness isn’t rooted in my mother’s recent passing, nor my father’s passing just a few months prior. Rather: if really pressed to trace its origins, I’d say this melancholy Big Bang sparked when my father first started losing his balance and dexterity, and then multiplied exponentially with every new symptom, every fruitless medical exam, every horrifying prognosis (and so on). These things pulled me toward the event horizon, and their deaths pushed me the rest of the way in.
There is no turning back, and most days I feel like I’m floating weightless in space, witnessing life at a distance and just waiting for cosmic forces to do what they will. But occasionally my daughter pulls me back down and wakes me up, a 33-pound anchor with just enough force to tether me momentarily to this planet.
“OK,” I said, looking down as she strained her neck to make eye contact. “What would you like to make for them?”
I expected a lot of hemming and hawing, but her quick reply indicated she’d been giving this a lot of thought long before she vocalized her request.
“A rainbow for Grandma and a sun-catcher for Papaw,” she said without missing a beat.
I told her we would make both, or we could possibly even make a rainbow sun-catcher—a single gift they could share—but it would be a few days, because we needed to think about the best way to approach the project(s). So we studied rainbows and light, and I explained how, in a way, a rainbow is a sun-catcher: that it is a refraction and dispersion of light cast by the sun.
And so one day while watering the flowers at my mother’s house, with the sun beating down from over our shoulders, she hatched an idea: “We can make a rainbow for Grandma to see right now! You make the rainbow, and I will catch it for Papaw!”
And so I did. And she did. And I thought our project was complete.
“No, no, no,” she said when I intimated as much later that day. “I still want to make a rainbow for Grandma and a sun-catcher for Papaw. Something they can see forever. I want to draw the rainbow, but I don’t know how to make a sun-catcher.”
I told her I would research ideas. A few more days passed, and she grew increasingly insistent.
“Mom, I really need to make those gifts for Grandma and Papaw,” she said. “How else will they know I love and miss them?”
There was no denying the urgency in her voice. I gathered the necessary supplies and we got to work, the only real hiccup being the lack of proper “indigo” and “violet” markers (she was insistent we make the rainbow exactly according to prism specifications). But we improvised with what we had, and she beamed with pride upon the completion of each project.
And then even more so a couple days later when we turned her drawing into a t-shirt she can wear whenever she wants to send a message to her grandmother. And I suppose she’ll beam again when we frame the original, but that is a project for another day.
Somewhere in-between the first arch of the rainbow and the finished shirt it hit me: we were completing these gifts on the eve on my parents’ wedding anniversary. Their first one since my father passed away. Their first one since my mother passed away. Their first once since my jaw became inexorably clenched in its current position.
I gaze at the sun-catcher, now irreverently taped to our window, and notice a puff of air eke out of my lungs. It travels up through my trachea and escapes from behind my teeth. A sigh.
I try to focus on the light but find myself succumbing to the push and pull of gravity and inertia—of nothingness and everything—all at once.
My feet rise from the Earth and then come down again, every hushed step and terrible stomp a battle between unseen forces.
I go where they take me.