Wouldn’t it be wonderful if childhood were the stuff of movies? I mean real family movies like The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins, not Meet the Fockersand National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (both of which are incredibly funny, but let’s face it—not exactly the picture perfect family you’d long to trade places with). Childhood should be filled with laughter and love, unicorns and rainbows. Children should not have to deal with death, they shouldn’t have to grieve. But life isn’t the movies, is it? In real life we can’t always shield children from the loss of those they love and the grief that follows.
Anna, like so many others, experienced death when she was a child. She lost an uncle and a grandmother, and she lost a few great-grandparents. That was hard, as it’s always hard when you lose someone in your family. But, at the same time, it’s the circle of life, isn’t it? The older generation passes, and the younger generation is left. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.
We all know that the time will come when we’ll need to say goodbye to grandparents and parents, and then the time will come when our own children will have to say goodbye to us. That’s how it’s supposed to work. But things don’t always work the way they’re supposed to, and circles sometimes lose their shape. By the time Tristan (she was still Anna then) was twelve years old she had experienced more loss than any child should have; her circle had been absolutely mangled.
The above is an excerpt from the book, When He Was Anna. It was a tough chapter to write; I wrote it as a “memory chapter”—a sort of ‘half-chapter’ between ‘real chapters.’ My “memory chapters” are like flash backs for me, glimpses of (mostly) happy times. This part of the book is obviously not about one of those happy times. This part of the book is about complete parental screw-up and regret. It’s about hindsight, regret, wanting more than anything to go back and fix my mess.
It’ll make more sense if you read the book, I promise. It made sense to Tristan. Tristan called me after reading the book to let me know that I was being too hard on myself, that I hadn’t screwed up nearly as badly as I thought. Tristan assured me that things weren’t nearly as bad as I had remembered.
