Nothing Gold Can Stay
Today's the day of my cousin's wake, and I'm terrified.
No, it's not because this is my first wake--in fact, this is the second familial death of the year, and it's only the end of February. No, this is because my cousin was a little over a year old when he passed away. A year old. A baby. He never got to live--he never sat in the beach sand to hear the roar of the ocean, of something so much bigger than him. He never had his first ice cream, never wore the drippy, sticky stuff on his pudgy little face.
He never lived, so how could he die?
I feel bad for his parents--my first cousin and his wife--because Tyler (the baby) really only knew the hospital, with its beeping noises and shockingly clean smells, as his home for his short time on earth. He was born with a condition that left holes in his heart, and when the doctors tried repairing it, he almost died then.
Apparently, he was doing so much better right before his heart failed. How could God--or whoever, whatever controls the ways of things--do that to this young couple? Give them hope, only to snatch it away from beneath them like a Persian rug, so they fall flat on their faces on the hard, unforgiving ground.
It's not fair, but apparently, life isn't fair, so maybe it is. In some fucking twisted way.
I visited Tyler once, months ago when he was getting one of a series of surgeries, and all I remember is avoiding looking at his bed because of how dwarfed and fragile he looked, hooked up to all of these machines and tubes, and--ugh. I couldn't... I couldn't deal with seeing something so innocent, so frail, being used as some outlet for those constantly bleeping machines.
I saw Olivia--my other baby cousin--for the first time just this past Sunday, and she was so tiny and pink and alive. I forgot about Tyler up until Jamie (the father, my first cousin) said he would die if he had to go to that funeral, after just becoming a new father.
And then I looked at Olivia with older, tired eyes and thought, Why did we get someone new in our family, only to lose someone else who never even got a chance? It's like someone thought that there wasn't enough room in our large family for two babies, and nixed off one of them just because we don't deserve two bundles of joy.
The wake is today, and I'm terrified. It's the thought of a tiny, baby-sized coffin that has my blood freezing and my heart stopping. It's not right! It's not right, goddamnit, and I don't want to see that because I know it'll stay put in my mind, somewhere in the dark recesses, and come out to haunt me whenever it pleases. But I'm not going to this wake, or the funeral tomorrow, for my health. I'm going because I support my family, through thick and thin, and I'll be there even if it hurts me to do so.
(One relatively good thing that could possibly come from this day would be the inspiration to write a dead!Drizzle story. I thought about it, and I'm not sure, but if I feel fit to bursting with emotion, I will spew out a little something in memory of baby Tyler.)
The rain is falling outside, and I don't think I've ever believed in Robert Frost more: nothing gold can stay.