I must share the aftermath of St. Patty’s Day this year. We did show up at our local watering hole with family and friends joining us. We did have too many libations, including the traditional shots of Jamesons. We ended up at home, pouring myself to bed to wake the next morning from a text from one of my ‘kids’.  He wanted to add to my Facebook post but instead, sent it to me privately.  I opened my social media to find a post my daughter made of our party, with her dad and I dancing in the background. I read his text and was trying to place how it was connected to this post. Then, a post I made popped up, and I remembered my cardinal rule to the kids, “don’t post drunk” and realized I had just broken that rule.

My post, in case you are one of the apparently few, who didn’t read it, was to Zane and said this:

“And the green in your blue-born eyes remind us we are Irish. And the whiskey drank in your honor remind us of your spirit. And the truth you are with my father are felt within my soul. My Parting Glass to you my son, will never be empty. Xo”

Jose’s text to me (and I have his permission to share) responded with this:

“And the everlasting laugh to which reverberates in my mind anytime I think of a time with you forever reminds me of how lucky I am to have known you. My heart breaks because now I have to remember you longer than I know you, but the memory of your smile teaches me the value of the good things in life.”

In our own grief, it is easy to forget that others are in pain. They too had a relationship to which they grieve. I recall a friend telling me, a year after Zane was killed, that his wife (who was like a sister to me), couldn’t get out of bed for a month because of her grief. One of Zane’s friends, the week of his death, thanked me for opening our home and said, “we don’t know where to take our grief. It helps we can come here.”

One of our close friends, who drove in from BC to escort us to all the ‘nasty’ appointments of identifying the body and organizing the cremation, broke down on our couch after everyone went home. Sobbing, he told us, “I was holding it in, to be strong and I think it just caught up now.” I remembered thinking caught up how?

I knew others were in pain. Of course they would be.  Zane was the best friend, the love of so many. But in my own despair, I could not comprehend the depth. I could not compare it to mine. We are not supposed to compare grief. So, I didn’t. I just ignored the others pain. I had to. I couldn’t take on more pain than was already handed to us. And now, years later, I am starting to see, to feel what I knew at our own ground zero. The others are in pain. We will always be in pain.  Together.

Jose’s sentimental and beautiful reply to acknowledge and agree with our pain was so moving. His vulnerability, or as he called it, “three beers deep feeling sad and sentimental”, captured the way many of his friends feel. And his recognition that one day your earthly connection can become shorter than the period that you were together in this life. That hurts.

I had Zane for almost twenty-seven years. I can’t imagine a time where I would have to say I have been without him longer than I was with him. Yet, for some of his close friends, that is the case. That is a new level of grief I had not considered. How agonizing the complicated pain with loving someone for longer than you have known them.

And yet, I know these kids will remember Zane for the rest of their time. How beautifully dark that is. To continue ‘being here’ for longer than you physically were through the love and remembrance of your comrades. May others find comfort in that their pain is a collective extension of the love for my son.