Beloved children,
As our family grows older—you’re 6 and almost 4, and I just turned 35—I would describe my experience of life as increasingly…echo-y.
You can think of an echo in terms of the source or the bounce-back. When I observe you taking in the world, I can’t help but look back to my earliest memories from those years—getting nipped at by our matriarch cat, Calico, wedging my head into the slats of our fence, moving from Indiana to Colorado in a boxy blue conversion van, reading my first book during kindergarten home-school with my mom. These and other imprints of my childhood were made when I was 3 or 4 or 5, roughly your same age. In that way, your experiences now feel like an echo of my experiences then.
Meanwhile, as a husband and father in my mid-30s, my life today feels somewhat like an echo of my parents’ when they were at this stage of life. When I turned 31, I reached the same age they were when I was born, and the older I get, the more my years overlap with the portion of their lives that I was present for. That cross-country move in the big blue van? That happened when my mom and dad were 35, a threshold I myself just reached. Arriving at the same milestones they once passed has increased my empathy for them, as well as my curiosity.
Of course, echoes imply a gap: there are no echoes without a chasm. Even if the sound remains intact, the wave carries nothing of the topography across which it travels. Likewise, even if I can transpose myself onto my parents’ lives 30-some years ago, and even if today they fill in some of the “source” material, largely I am left to wonder what their day-to-day experiences were like, how they saw themselves in the world, what kept them up at night.
And then there are caverns hardly mapped at all, echoes whose source is forever lost. When I turned 34 last year, I felt just such an echo.
Thirty-four is a significant age in our family. When my mom was a small child, her mother—your great-grandmother, Cherry—died tragically from an undetected brain tumor. She was 34. I have known this basic fact for as long as I can remember, but when I approached that weighty age myself, a somber curiosity overtook me. Suddenly I felt compelled to face a past I had never much wondered about. When I asked for details from my mom (Mimi, to you), I was reminded of the old saying that truth is stranger than fiction.
When Cherry died, my mom was 6 and her brother Les was 14. A devastating loss. Years later, after Les had grown up and married, his wife also suffered a tragic death, just days before turning 34. If that wasn’t eerie enough, Les’s wife had a daughter who was 14 at the time, the same age as Les when he lost his mother.
As you can imagine, 34 became sort of haunted, carrying the most chilling of echoes. When my mom herself turned 34, naturally she had a lot to process. Part of her assumed she wouldn’t see 35. What’s more, she now had a 6-year-old daughter of her own, casting new light on an old grief.
The story wasn’t done, though. In an amazing turn, on the 45th anniversary to the day of Cherry’s passing, your oldest cousin on my side of the family was born, and my mom became a grandmother. A day that had marked death came to mark new life.
And I suppose the story still isn’t done. Last year, I had my own processing to do as I approached 34. Despite your mother’s insistence on us doing something festive to celebrate, my one birthday wish was to spend the morning at a coffee shop to sit and reflect. Even before I’d finished the walk to the café, a poem was spilling out of me. What better name to give it than Cherry, my late maternal grandmother.
While this poem and the story behind it will mean very little to you now, I suspect that some years later it may take on greater significance, ringing across your lives as one among many echoes.
Cherry
I missed you for the first time today,
on the eve of turning 34,
the age you died
sixty years ago.
It’s hard to grieve
what you don’t know.
I miss you, the missing you.
The French say it better: tu me manques.
You’re missing from me.
Tu manques.
It’s hollow grieving
what you don’t know.
You are the grandmother I never knew,
the mother my mother must wonder about.
Where are you in her? In me?
In my son, almost as old as she was
when you passed?
We circle and circle.
For years, you were three earrings
in one ear, four in the other,
casting black spots
across my mother’s mind.
She feared and fretted—
then reached 35.
Her first grandson
was born the same day you died,
forty-five years later—
cherry blossom on a dormant tree.
It’s a heavy gift living
what we don’t know,
but still a gift, like the brilliant
sakura, shameless and brief.
I wish I could see you.
That may be this earthen life—
the wishing, the seeing and longing
to see, the gray hair never grown
tethering those before to those to come,
all imagining a place
where the blossoms never fall.