Dear Declan,
You are seven today.
Seven sounds magical when you say it out loud: Seven. Declan is Seven. We can look at the Pleiades and assign a year of your life to each sister. Or one year to every day of the week. Or one to each note on the musical scale. Or to each color in the visible light spectrum. You are seven, my baby. You are everywhere.
And you are magical. You do magic tricks with cards and bags and handkerchiefs and coins. You practice and practice your sleight of hand and then perform for people who ooh and aah. You almost always want to share the secret of each trick, prompting your audiences to say things like “a magician should never reveal his secrets” (especially when your audiences include adults).
But you have a different idea, which goes a little something like this: Everything worth knowing is worth sharing. Truthfully, I can think of little that is more magical than the way you still constantly, enthusiastically learn and then share what you’ve learned, like a treasure hunter who enjoys the gems and fine metals he uncovers best when he can give them all away. Abracadabra.
And there is always more that you want to know. You come home from a day’s work of doing long multiplication at school and ask me how to multiply using Pi so that you can compute the circumference of a circle. I try to do it longhand with decimal points on paper only to find out from the calculator that I have no idea what I’m doing.
“That’s okay mom,” you say to me, patting me on the shoulder. “You’re just a little tired. You’ll figure it out after you think about it a while.”
I wear a meteorite on a necklace that you gave me for Valentine’s Day. It’s the ultimate reminder of my boy and his infinite love for the universe. You laugh when I interrogate it about what part of the galaxy it is from.
“It can’t be that far,” you tell me. “It has to be from this solar system. But who knows? Maybe as far as the Kuiper belt.”
You’ve always been kind-hearted. And lately it feels like kindness has become not only something you do, but something you have come to believe in. One day after school, you told me that a friend of yours had been crying, so you crouched down next to him and put your hand on his back. A teacher saw this and said “you are a very kind person, Declan.” You couldn’t wait to tell me that an adult had called you kind. It made you glow with pride.
Sometimes friends of mine see how often you smile in pictures and ask me “is he ever unhappy?” And certainly, you can be, and I try to give you the room to be, because unhappiness is an important thing to feel sometimes. But it is surprisingly rare for you. You’re so excited about the experience of being alive.
You love babies. You smile your face off whenever you’re around one. You touch them gently on the feet and look them in the eyes to make them laugh. You also love dogs. Sometimes you lie down next to Arrow to see things from his perspective. You think about what it must be like to be him.
Anyone who knows you and me knows that you are the love of my life. And for the time being, I am still yours. I’ve done a lot of crying in the past few months because I miss people who have died. You wipe the tears off of my face as you let me tell you something about why I loved whomever I am missing. Then you hug me so tight that it’s hard for me to stay sad. When I think about what a loving, perceptive son I have, all I can feel is grateful.
We talked in the car one night this spring, about all of the feelings that grief can bring, how those feelings aren’t always the most obvious ones.
“I know mom,” you told me from the back seat. “Anger can mask sadness.”
The last time you saw your nanny alive in March, you held her hand and her gaze so sweetly. “Good lookin’,” she said to you, examining your face. “You have beautiful blue eyes.”
When I was your age, I remember being irrationally afraid that my grandmother’s broken wrist might be contagious. You, not yet seven, knew more than a lot of adults about what death really looks like, and you stood there holding your nanny’s hand. I would have given you the space to be afraid. But you knew that she was dying and you stood there, smiling calmly and gently at her for minutes and minutes at a time, giving her such comfort and joy.
I hope that I can become more like you.
At the funeral, you wiped the tears off of your daddy’s face. And mine. You got to hug your beautiful half-sister for the very first time. You were surrounded by people who loved you. You were completely overwhelmed. Especially by the thought of a boy losing his mother, like your daddy and his brothers just did. That night you hugged me so hard I thought you might bruise my neck and you whispered I just can’t imagine not having you, mom.
A few mornings later, we walked into your classroom. A small rainbow was reflected on the ground. You scooped up the colorful light with your hands and rubbed it all over my face.
“Is that for good luck?” I asked.
“No, it’s to keep you safe,” you told me.
Declan, I am so far inside of your heart, it’s a wonder that you don’t hear my voice every time that it beats. I don’t take credit for your intelligence or your kindness – you arrived here with those things. But I see how loved you feel, how confident and secure you are, how much room you have to become yourself, and I know that I have something to do with that, which makes me proud.
It makes me cry, too. Really good tears. Big happiness is also important to feel sometimes. And you’ve given me a lot of that.
I woke up this morning and wrapped you up in my arms and said “happy birthday my sweet boy! You are seven!”
“I know. It’s so exciting,” you told me.
It is.
(Insert our secret greeting/goodbye here, including one kiss on your hand that goes to infinity.)
I love you to pieces, my son.
oxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo
Mom
Beautiful.
How lovely….your writing is so pure and simple and true.
Soon he will be 16 years old and you will wonder where the time want.