“It’s Like a Half-Eaten Sadness Sandwich

You want to finish it but you can’t.

Because you are already so full of sadness. And at the same time you don’t want to finish it because then what? You are finished with them? But you need them still, even if their not here. You still need them.”

This was Leo’s analogy the other night in bed as he told me through tears how much he misses his gran, my mom. I listened and refrained from crying for a while so as to not to steal his sadness thunder.

I have about five trillion of these half-eaten sandwiches myself.

He said he feels sad but also kind of frustrated and angry because he didn’t know when he had to say goodbye to her all the other questions he would want to ask. And now he can’t.

He quickly added because he knew what I’d say, “ I know I can still talk to her but it isn’t the same.”

“It certainly isn’t,” I admittedly replied.

“I just feel like she saw me, mom. Like she really understood what was in MY heart. Not just the outside everyone else knows. She could see inside. And she loved me for that, you know?” he asked.

“Do I ever Leo,” I said. “There aren’t many people who can see like that.”

“There are things I’d want to ask her now that I’m older and I feel like now she could really help me with things I am thinking about. I didn’t know then what I’d want to ask,” he said.

“I know how you feel honey, it’s only after gran died that I began loving the things she loved, and actually engaging in them– you know like baking muffins and gardening. When she was here, I could enjoy them through her.

Now I have to become them.”

Leo nodded. It felt good not to be missing her like this.

Letting her into this intimate room.

I continued, “It feels like doing the things she loved allows me to be closer to her somehow and keep her present in our lives even though we can’t greet her at the door with her freshly starched white shirt and basket full of warm blueberry muffins.

I have so many questions I want to ask her.

Like what is wrong with apples trees and exactly how much to prune back the hydrangea this fall and if there’s enough sunlight to do a vegetable bed in the lower backyard.

“Could we look it up?” Leo asked.

“That’s the weird thing. Yes, But no.

I don’t just want the answers. I want her answers. Because they would have been different. They would have come from years of experience and from a kind of caring – a kind caring that Google can’t quite replicate.

“I know what you mean mom,” Leo said.

“I want to tell you something Leo,” I said, sitting up in his bed and looking directly at him.

She would have been so proud of you. She is. 

You have such a magical unique way of seeing the world. You are a poet.

“There is kind of poet that cannot be made. He or she is born. These poets see and hear and breathe the world in a different way.

They live at a rare intersection with reality.

There are complexities and intuitive intricacies their soul captures that only they have the vision to translate.

You are this kind of a poet, Leo.

I am so deeply grateful for this. I never would have been able to put my finger on why it is so difficult to finish the half-eaten sadness sandwich. And you said it.

Because it feels like you will somehow be finished with them.

And it is so interesting in this week where we are trying to up our odds of happiness that what seems most essential to our happiness is feeling the overwhelming depth of this sadness.”

“Otherwise it just clouds the way,” he said, rolling over and pulling his pillow in tighter.

“I think when she died, a lot of her just went straight into you mom.”