Forgive & Forget

Simon was 5 years old when she got sick. His nana came to pick him up after school. He didn’t think anything of it. I didn’t see him for almost a week I was so consumed by the vortex of diagnosis, admission and oncologists. 

I got sucked in. I disappeared. 

I vanished into a frenzy of terror and research. I channeled all my energy into anything that was essential – and excessive – to save her. To save myself from living the nightmare of having to carry on ‘after’. Without her. 

And to do that, I forgot Simon. 

My blond-hair, blue-eyed gap-toothed smiling little boy. He hated pants with buttons – just like his mummy. He rocked a classic wardrobe colour palette of blue – just like his daddy. 

He was the first.  And as the first, he had a full and undistracted audience. His first word, his first meal, his first tooth, his first step.

He tethered our lives. He governed when we slept and ate, where we went and how quickly we got there.  He trained us more than we taught him. Not by being difficult or defiant. By not knowing better, he just was. 

He was everything magical and nothing special. 

He anointed us with titles that, without ceremony or badges, were the most coveted. 

Mummy and Dad. 

Nana and Poppa. 

Auntie and Uncle.

By blood and by honour, he built the village that would raise him from infant to child. From boy to man. Every member of his village saw his potential and took up their role with relish and patience.  

Five-years in and we were killing it. 

He was perfectly imperfect, filled with a kind of easy confidence that comes from knowing you are loved and have an army of people who would fight a bear to spare you a moment of pain. 

And then, in a blink, he was forgotten. 

Suddenly, that same village who had nurtured and celebrated him seemed distracted. Distant. Different. The village split with leaders called to the emergency at hand, he was left to be cared for by the rest. The elders had bigger problems. More important work to do. 

He was thoughtfully abandoned to this multitude. Outsourced to the safety of a community he loved and loved him right back. It wasn’t cruel or heartless. It was – I whisper, relentlessly rationalizing – necessary.

What choice did I have? 

And with every justification I build my case for vindication. Absolution. Forgiveness.

The exoneration I seek from him I grant to myself as a consolation prize. 

As her disease progressed and stabilized, I started to reappear. I was home and present – truly present – for the rare dinners at home as our interim family-of-three. Between night-shifts at the hospital, afternoon naps and showers at home, I found space for him again. As I packed lunches for school and cooked casseroles left on our door step in the oven, I measured the forgotten time in weeks.  As the months grew between then and now, so too did my inclination to forgive myself. 

I forgave myself for forgetting him. 

It was easy to do. His village is so robust, he hardly missed me.  It was good for him to get some independence. He is resilient, just like me. I justified it all.  What’s worse? I used his continued compassion, trust and unconditional love for me as proof. Proof of what I desired and desperately needed to believe. 

Perhaps you can forgive being forgotten. Maybe you can forget being forgotten. Once.

We all make choices, conscious or not. No matter how well-intentioned or how unique the circumstances, our choices are actions and our actions have impact.  

Whether by necessity or circumstance, I chose to forgot him. And somehow I got away with it. 

The second time around I was not so lucky. 

He was 7-years old when she relapsed. School was still in session, the days getting longer with the promise of summer close enough to taste. 

It was the day before his birthday party at a bowling alley. Two days before our mini-get-away to Niagara Falls with no other purpose than to sleep in hotel beds and fight over room temperature. A vacation to stew in circumspect public hot tubs and sneak coffee cups filled with wine to the pool deck while we watched our kids practice cannon balls in front of the no-running sign.  A box-standard family vacation that you come home from more tired than when you left.  

The birthday party went ahead.

From the moment it started I sought escape. 

My photo stream verifies that I managed to stand up and stand in for the obligatory cake-cutting photo. I clapped when he blew out the candles. I endured the obscenity of the gift-opening ritual mere hours after leaving the barren and sterile hospital where the other kid would spend the next – maybe the last – days, weeks and months of her life.

I spent his two-hour party waiting for it to be over. 

Feeling I should be somewhere else. Needing – no wanting – to be with someone else. Tortured by this well-lit venue that smelled of pre-pubescent sweat and buttercream icing. I craved the quiet, antiseptic scent of a twelve by fifteen room where people shuffled softly and avoided making eye contact with me. Is it worse to be absent or resentfully present? 

I disappeared. Again.

Simon was sent home with friends who subbed in their family for ours and took the scheduled mini-break to Niagara Falls. I outsourced, again, without thought or discussion. Simon returned home happy, tired and with a blood sugar level that would fell a bison. But enthusiasm, chocolate and souvenirs can only make up for so much. How many arcade tickets does it take to forget being left behind? How many movie nights and late bedtimes before you can forgive your mummy for forgetting you?

Again.

When she got sick – despite every attempt to keep life outside the hospital ‘normal’ – everything changed. The differences were subtle; indiscernible to the casual observer. Like a change in air pressure that you cannot see but some of us can feel. 

So while the sun kept shining, she – and her illness – began to eclipse it. 

She began to eclipse him. 

Even now, long after her diagnosis and relapse, it’s still different. Does the sun shine differently for her? Does she absorb the warmth at a different rate?  I can see now what I didn’t then. Pockets of cold. Regions of dark. Shadows. 

And even though I can see it now, I think he remembers it better. He can remember how cold that cold felt. What it was to go from the warmth of brilliant sun to a place dimmer and darker than he ever imagined. How it was to be left in the shadows of an already impossibly dark place. 

How he found the spaces and cracks to hide those memories I’ll never know. That is the desperate magic of the forgotten child.  The sibling of the ‘hero’, the ‘fighter’. The kid who is wordlessly conscripted to the role of ‘mummy’s helper’ or ‘the good boy’.  What we ask these forgotten children to do – what we expect and demand from them – is for them to stop being what they are. Children.

And it happens in a moment. 

It was after she relapsed that Simon and I had the shortest and most demanding conversation in our relationship to date. 

It was a month into treatment and just after we confirmed that first round of chemo hadn’t worked. At all. We didn’t have a plan. We weren’t sure we even had hope.

I was putting Simon to bed. He was brushing his teeth as I leaned on the door frame of the bathroom watching him, making sure he didn’t just run his toothbrush under the tap. Standard mum stuff.

Standing on the step stool in front of the sink he stopped brushing and, with foamy suds at the corners of his mouth, looked up at me and said “Fiona is really sick”. 

I nodded. 

“Is she going to get better?” 

 “I hope so” I said. 

He looked back to the mirror and adjusted the grip on his little green toothbrush. Bringing it back up to his mouth, the toothbrush paused mid-air as he turned back to me with one more question. 

 “Is Fiona going to die?”

All the air left my body. My mind flooded with all the parenting-promises we made to each other and ourselves. 

To tell the truth.

To be honest but gentle. 

To never to disrespect them with lies or fairy tales. 

Carefully,  I used the air I had managed to recover into my belly and said “Everyone is working really hard so she doesn’t, but yes. Fiona might die.”

He didn’t move. 

Having witnessed some frightening things at this point in my life, a little boy shocked to stillness is unnerving at best. He blinked and nodded his head once, the way you would to wordlessly acknowledge an acquaintance on the street.  I held my body still and my eyes artificially wide to hold back the tears. I waited as he squared his shoulders to the mirror and let his eyes fall down to the sink. 

I didn’t breathe or blink. Every muscle in my body contracted in anticipation of what would happen next. It could have been two seconds or two days. I waited. 

When he finally raised his eyes up they were wet. Keeping his body still and shoulders levelled, he lifted his blue eyes to me in the mirror to tell me – and maybe to tell himself too – “I don’t want Fiona to die”. 

“Me neither buddy. Me neither.”

I’m not sure how I didn’t collapse in the door frame right then and there but I didn’t. I finished putting him to bed and then I put myself to bed. I don’t remember if I cried then, or later or just laid there in the dark replaying the conversation, wondering if I had gotten it right. 

I forget.   

I can’t tell you his first word. Or where we were when he took his first step. I’m not sure if it was cereal or squash that was his first meal.

But I remember the conversation that marked the end of his childhood.  

I remember how carefully I chose my words, wary of making promises I couldn’t keep. I remember the force of will it took to be honest when a lie we both wanted to believe danced deliciously on the tip of my tongue. I remember the effort it took to resist the lure of telling a happily-ever-after story-ending. I remember the bitter taste of bile rising in the back of my throat as I gave him the answer to his question. I remember the heat and fury in my chest that the question had to be asked.  

Less than fifty words. That’s the measure of the moment he stopped being a little boy. 

A 90-second interaction. That’s how long it took for his childhood to disappear into the greedy, yawning mouth of this indiscriminate disease. 

I can’t forget. I want to forget it but I remember it all. 

And the moments I want to forget the most are the ones, ironically, where forgetting is involved. 

Simon must remember these moments too. Worse, I imagine he remembers more of them. Time heals everything, or so they say. Maybe – with time – he will forget. With age and perspective, perhaps he will come to forgive. I’m not sure which comes first – the forgiving or the forgetting. 

I can forgive a lot. 

I can forgive this disease for happening. I can forgive it for coming back and putting up a hell of a fight. I can forgive it for the pressure it put on my marriage and my health.

Forgetting is harder. 

Being forgotten is harder still. 

What I cannot forget is what it required of Simon.  And I will not forgive it.