The month leading up to Logy's accident had been busy. My aunt and uncle sold their home on the lake and were preparing to auction off most of their belongings. Logy and I were making the 60-mile round trip every day for about a month to help them. In the process, I think they sent home with me more of their worldly goods than they sold! I stacked most of the things I'd accumulated in the living room, adding more and more each night when we got home. My house looked like it had been sadly neglected every single hour of the month prior...and it had.
Logan's 19th birthday would have been September 5th. It was Monday-Memorial Day 2011. We made a plan that I would bake his favorite German chocolate cake, pick up my mother-in-law, and drive down to the college to spend the day with him. His maternal grandmother knew it was Logan's time to fly free. His paternal grandmother really, really needed to see him in his college setting. She wanted to see his dorm room, the campus, the town. She wanted to bake him some chocolate chip cookies to remind him of her and to celebrate his birthday. Not many 19-year-olds, finally free from the restraints of home for the first time, would concede to celebrating the day with two old ladies, but Logan was the kind of kid who would have done just that. He'd have eaten the cake, walked with Grandma as she shuffled at a snail's pace around his college campus, sat quietly at the table and listened to his mom and grandma discuss grocery prices, then hugged us goodbye and, tucking the cookies under his arm, he'd have talked to himself as he walked back to his new life. When his friends asked him about it later, he'd probably have said his birthday was boring as hell, but he'd have been kind to us as we celebrated.
The day of the auction finally arrived. Saturday, September 3, 2011. My plan was to spend Sunday cleaning and re-organizing the house and baking that chocolate cake. But, God doesn't seem to care if your house is ready for a death in the family. The real disaster, for about 20 hours after I got the news about Logy, was that my house was not fit for company. I have come to see that, when the world falls down around you, when you have lost sight of your feet and the feel of the earth beneath you, God does what it takes to keep your mind from caving in on itself. I have heard stories of how detached and cold some people are when they receive the news that they've lost someone dear to them. It's especially shocking when it is the reaction of a mother. Mothers, as a general rule, invest everything they have--emotionally, physically, mentally--in their children. We expect mothers to collapse on the spot from the weight of such a loss. Sometimes God steps in, wrapping the mind carefully with the things it can still control, and little by little, allows reality to trickle down through the layers, in amounts large enough to allow the grief to begin, but small enough to keep sanity from escaping.
That night, my husband and I crawled into bed. It took every effort I had to breathe in and back out again. I had to concentrate to make it happen. It felt like an elephant had wedged its ass between my heart and my lungs. I whispered, "Do you think he knew that I loved him? Did I show it? Did I just say it? Did I boss and push and peck and point and correct, or did I show him what he was to me? Did I love him big enough?" We whispered our fears back and forth in the dark. Exhausted, my husband finally fell asleep. I kept pushing air in and out, around the elephant's ass, but sleep eluded me. I crawled out of bed and started cleaning my house. I finished at 5 am. It wasn't perfect, but it was mourner ready.
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