Gone, Baby
December 8, 2013
It was a frigid December night when my little boy disappeared. Off he toddled into the inky darkness — unbeknownst to anyone — the wind howling, blowing tiny feet off the ground. In a split second, my little Huckleberry had disappeared.
We were at a birthday party, pooling the birthdays of several kids into one grand, chaotic pallooza. The kids were amped up, fueled by cake, punch and presents. The party was at a ranch in the upper level of the barn. How long was it before I noticed him missing? At first I didn’t say anything, concerned about overreacting. I certainly didn’t want to be a party spoiler. Ignoring my anxieties, I quietly searched the room. After several feigned casual inquiries, it was abundantly clear no one had seen him for more than 20 minutes. Like the turning of the screw, I enlisted some girlfriends to help me search. No luck. No Huck.
My fear ratcheted. That moment, from casual to concern, from frivolity to gravity, was one I’ll never forget, where I dropped concern for others and called for an all-out search. The adults mobilized, the men ran for flashlights, the older kids crawled through the hay loft and the bull pen. Had he been trampled? Suffocated by hay? Push those thoughts deep. Keep it together. Don’t panic. Outside, the wind and snow stinging our faces, my mind racing but my mouth mute, envisioning my child wandering on the plains, disoriented, cold and frightened. Gone.
Seventy-two minutes later, we found him, freezing and without a coat in the sub-twenty degree weather, standing on the patio peering into the glass front door of a nearby house. He had followed a group of children who headed home early, the mother unaware that she had picked up a straggler. It was only after she put her children to bed did she notice my baby boy standing outside her front door, bewildered and scared but otherwise fine.
After I’d driven home that night — that most harrowing night of my life – and put my kids to bed, I was overcome by the emotions I repressed only hours earlier. I wept for being a terrible mom, more interested in adult conversation than attentiveness. I sobbed as I played out my worst fears during the time my Huckleberry vanished. Deep into that evening, adrenaline still coursing through me and too ginned up to sleep, I tried to shake those tar-baby thoughts from my mind. I crawled into bed with Huck and peered closely at him, tracing the tender outline of his face. I marveled. I wrapped my arms around his tiny torso, affirming his presence. In the silence of those pre-dawn hours, I watched his breath slowly rising and falling, perfect in every way (after all, aren’t all our children magnificent?).
Losing a child, even temporarily, is the most singular terrifying moment I’ve experienced as a parent. I will never forget that feeling of panic and fear, and recall it with a dry mouth and rumbling nausea. In that split second, I glimpsed the colossal grief, the agonizing reality of our family minus one.
It’s a moment I hope to never repeat. We all have variations on those moments. The voice on the phone that tells you the doctor saw something funky in your latest exam and he’d like to “take another look.” The bulbous silence of the examination room while you wait for your results. In the stillness of the room, you catalogue your still-to-do list, so much living yet to be done. Your priorities spontaneously re-align. I commit to remembering those moments, those microcosms of time in which the tectonic plates shift.
This is the season of thankfulness, of caring and of benevolence. This should not be the season of “I want” or “I need.” I so easily get swept into that nonsense, the must-haves, the hurry-sale-ends-today when I should really stop, take an accounting of the blessedly mundane, the blissful ordinariness and repeat to myself, “I have have have.”
My Huckleberry turns 10 this week. He’s an insightful, inquisitive, earnest little light to me. Those moments when I’m tempted to ring his neck for singing too loud, hugging me so hard he blocks my wind pipe, or for practicing his dance moves rather than set the table, I recall that agonizing eternity not so long ago when he was gone from me. I step back and join in the chorus.
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