Love

Day 13 of 21 Disrupt The Gap

Josh Groban sings, and powerful tears surge in my belly tonight, lubricate my eyes, unexpectedly. I’m not surprised, I wondered if this would come sometime in my 21 day #DisruptTheGap.

All day I’ve thought of faces I love and who love me. On this rainy night, after gazing at the dogs, especially Kenai in his waning time, I followed instinct, and turned to my iPhone to see what face caught my imagination today, with awareness (day 12) that eyes are a window to the soul.

I discovered my iPhone has a section titled “For You” on the bottom bar. Exploring it for the first time, I chose “On This Day” and a few photos surprised me. One in particular—my son must have been 9 or 10, and my nieces Lulu and Emma were really little. The color was blown out, he wore a collared shirt, and looked so handsome. He had a black eye (I don’t ever recall him having a black eye.) I have no clue how this image from a California vacation in the late 1990s or 2000 was in my iPhone. It must have been an image I took a photo of, but I truly don’t recall which photo album it would even be in. Stunned, I saved it and worked with it in Lightroom CC on my iPhone to no avail–it was grainy and blurry, sweet only to me, and the mysterious gap it sought to bridge to speak to me this day.

I went on a hunt, looking for the original in the house, and couldn’t locate it. Ended up in my loft at Justin’s bookshelves, lined with his favorite young reader books, his track metals, journal, a few other boy things, and a turquoise Harry Potter cardboard box stuffed with keepsakes. I opened the box lid. Little boy pencil writing on lined notebook paper greeted me. He’d written, “I love my Mom, she is nice.” I breathed, entering that in-between place, where the veil is thin between worlds in time and place, here and now, and timelessness. Air embraced me. The gap of what my life had once been and is now interfaced.

His box of memories is precious; I smiled with belonging and remembering. The photo I sought wasn’t there. I read a few pages of his journal (he’d been girl crazy!), and then found a stack of this photo in an envelope on the shelf. I remembered this moment so well in the summer of 2005, Homer, on vacation to visit Alaska, and my parents at their lodge. When Justin died, I printed hundreds of this photo in the color version, added a sticker with words he lived by on the back, and shared them with nearly 900 people who came to his funeral. I can hear the djembe drumbeat from the funeral now, see those grief-stricken faces, the flickering sweetgrass candles, the Mass, the grief and confusion and love present.

I took a photo of the photo, and now I write, aware of gaps. Love. Faces. Healing and wholeness. How each of us loves, and lives, and grieves, and when we are brave, we dare to love all over again.

I hear my boy whisper in my heart, “Mom, I love you. You are nice. Let go, it’s time to soar. Share your love.” And now his song plays, of course. I smile, through the seamless gap. Thank you Pandora, and Justin, for singing to me through lyrics all these years, healing me, consoling me, challenging me. And, especially for these, streaming now: “Somewhere, over the rainbow … bluebirds fly … trouble melts like a lemon drop … and the dreams …”

I love my boy, Justin M. Bernecker, 1989-2006