Free Fallin'

Tomorrow my beautiful boy will have been gone for six months. Six whole months. At first, I kept track of his absence in days. Now it’s in months. How is that even possible?

A while ago I was standing by the shrine I’ve made in his memory, and I noticed that everything–the photos, the vase of dried roses from the Gathering, the urn for our dogs, Neptune and Bella, Sam’s wooden box containing his ashes, the wee Buddha, were covered in a thin layer of dust, and all I could think was, how can that be? How can he have been gone so long that he has gathered a layer of dust? Now I've had to dust a few times.

Time is passing and I’m so fucking terrified that my beautiful boy is fading. My boy is slipping away.

I’ve been a mother for 38 years. 35 years for Sam. The worst thing about being a mother is living with the possibility of outliving one of your children. I’ve always said the one thing I cannot survive is the loss of either Jenna or Sam. But here I am. Writing a blog. Taking the dogs for a walk. Knitting. Watching TV like a regular person. Yesterday I went for a bike ride with a new friend and when she fell off a log into a swamp and emerged a muddy swamp monster, I laughed. It was almost a real laugh. And for a moment I let some joy trickle in again. How can I laugh when my son is dead?

When you lose your child, you look for signs everywhere that he/she still exists on some plane. I’m trying to believe that my beautiful boy is still with me.

I consider myself more cynical than spiritual. But over the years, I’ve had so many premonitions, so many connections to the dead, that I can’t ignore the fact that we are more than just physiological beings: blood, bones, water, guts, cells….

When my boyfriend, Dan Guthrie, died in an avalanche in Alaska in 1987, I knew the moment he was dead. It sounds freaky. It sounds woo-woo. But I know what I experienced. I dreamt his death. He and our roommate, Ian, falling off the mountain, 3000 feet, ice axes flailing, the snow of the avalanche swirling around them. I woke up distraught, sobbing, absolutely certain they were gone. And they were. I can’t connect my dream to the moment of their fall, but it was within hours.

But I had already foreseen Dan’s death. I knew when I dropped him off at the airport that I’d never see him again. It wasn’t just worry. Paranoia. It was certainty.

There was sign after sign after sign leading up to Sam’s death. As early as when I was at the University of Calgary with the kids, when Sam was a toddler. I had a dream. An awful, awful dream. One that I wrote about in my memoir because it so affected me. One that still breaks me.

It’s winter. I’m crossing an iced-over river, holding hands with my two-year old Sam. Suddenly, he falls through a hole in the ice. I’m still holding his hand. Holding on for dear life. His little body gets pulled under the ice, and I’m still holding, but the current is so strong. I can feel it pulling on his body. I can feel his hand slipping. Slipping. He’s slipping away from me. I hold on as long as I can but then his hand slips out of mine and he’s gone. My baby is gone under the ice. I couldn’t hold onto him. I couldn’t save him. The one thing a mother is supposed to do. Hold onto their child.

The premonitions of losing Sam came to me, over and over, for years.

I had two charms I wore on a chain that my sister gave to me, an “S” and a “J” stamped in silver. They were for Jenna and Sam, and I felt like as long as I was wearing the names of my children around my neck, I was protecting them. I clung to them as a talisman, especially after Sam stormed out of our home, and isolated himself from us for a year. Every day that he was out of communication, I agonized over how he was coping without me. His mother. Often, I wondered if he was even alive. One day, I noticed the “S” was no longer on my chain. I panicked, sure that it was a sign that Sam was not okay. One morning, I was in our hot tub, sobbing, completely overwhelmed with a feeling that Sam was in imminent danger and I reached down to the bottom of the tub and felt something. I picked it up. It was my “S.” It was my Sam. Soon after, we got a call from the West Vancouver Police that they’d pulled Sam off the Lion’s Gate Bridge. He had tried to jump.

Every cell in my body had known my boy was in trouble.

On March 5^th of this year, at 2:30 pm our time, I was walking at the golf course with my friend, Vicki, who had recently lost her spouse. We were talking about Sam, and I was overwhelmed with emotion, longing for him, wondering how he was. I told Vicki how worried I was. That I knew something was wrong. Something was so off. Every cell in my body was pulling toward him. Reaching for him. And every cell in my body must have known on some level that at that very moment, the moment I was walking around the golf course and talking about my boy, he was jumping off his balcony.

Every maternal cell in my body knew the moment my son left this earth.

Now I’m looking for signs that my boy is still with me. I look for signs everywhere. I don’t give a fuck that I sound woo-woo. I need to know my boy is okay.

The other day I was hiking down a trail behind the house and my mind was on repeat: “My beautiful blue-eyed boy,” over and over and I was getting more and more upset and then I saw, in the middle of the trail, a glint of blue–the feather of a bluebird, as though Sam had placed it there for me. Blue for his blue eyes.

Now I collect feathers wherever I go. They always looked intentionally placed there. Once the tiny fluff of down of a baby bird. Reminding me of Sam, the wee baby with huge blue eyes.

The other day, I was sitting on our backyard deck, “having a moment.” That’s what I call it now. Dan says, “Are you ok?” and I just say, “I’m having a moment.” Understatement of the fucking year. I was looking over our lawn, which is not really a lawn but just dirt that turns to a mud bog in the rain, thanks to two big joyful dogs tearing up and down the hill.

So, I’m doing my thing, tearfully thinking of Sam, probably sipping wine, I can’t remember now, and a bird lands right in the middle of the dirt. Not just any bird. An exotic bird. I’ve never seen anything like it in Canada. It looked like it had flown in from Australia. It was bright yellow with a red head and black wings. It sat in the dirt for at least a full minute, while I stared.

After it flew away, I looked it up. It was a Western Tanager, and apparently, it’s pretty common to see them in Squamish amongst conifer forests. But that doesn’t take away the fact that my one minute with that bird did something. It made me feel wonder.

Woo-woo me felt like Sam’s spirit was in that little bird. That Sam was trying to tell me that he was okay. That he was free.

Maybe it has something to do with the way Sam chose to leave this world. Through flight. It seems so appropriate that Sam comes to me in the form of birds. My beautiful boy who chose flight as his path out of this world of pain and turmoil.

Flight is freedom.

Tom Petty’s “Free Falling” is one of my favourite songs. I don’t know if Sam ever even listened to it.

“I’m gonna free fall out into nothin’,

gonna leave this world for a while.

And I’m free

Free fallin’’

Yeah, I’m free

Free fallin’.