Facebook memories are happy little killers. Their prefered attack time is early morning, so they can mess with my head all day. Of course, not all memories are killers, but the killers are the attention-getters right now.
The thing is, a year ago, this specific memory made me smile. I pray it’ll make me smile in the future. This year, this week, it brought instant tears. Immediate eye overflow. This is a hard week. I’m having trouble getting my head around the fact that Cooper’s been gone half a year. So this year, this week, Cooper’s beam signature made me cry, made me miss him even more.
The backstory: All through high school, Cooper worked lights for our school productions. I’m the technical director, so we worked together. I even conned him into coming back and helping me with the heavy lifting a few times after he’d graduated. All three of my kids plus my niece and nephew were involved in some capacity, but Cooper’s is the only signature I’ve found. It’s on a beam at the top of the gym section of our “cafe-gym-a-torium.” From the floor, you can see that something’s there, but it’s only legible if you get close.
I get close.
Each year, I run my fingers over his signature and smile at his small act of rebellion. Each year, I find myself in the fully-extended scissor lift, doing the light-hanging job Coop did. It’s a connection to him, and I usually annoy him with a text. There will be no text this year, no Snap for Coop. Just tears, memories, and whimpers of, “God I miss you, Coop.”
Perhaps fittingly, I’m not hanging lights in that same space this year. Stupid covid. Unlike so many things that have changed in recent months, this change is not due to Cooper’s death. It’s a reminder, though, of what we’ve lost. It’s a reminder of the strings that tie us together, hold us together. Strings that can become knotted, frayed, untied. Strings that can bind us and trip us. Strings that can snap and break. Strings that cannot be made like new.
These strings — these reminders — are everywhere. Sometimes they do pop up in the form of Facebook memories. Other times, I see Cooper in a book I’m teaching or hear him in the lyrics of a song students use for a project. I recognize him in speech topics — mental health, suicide, wanderlust, appreciation of nature — and in the passions of my students. Strings that tie us together.
Over the course of the year, I learn more about coworkers and students. Sometimes I have the impulse to introduce Cooper; they’d have so much in common. A friend’s mother passed after a long illness, and my initial and repeated thought was that I should make sure Cooper knows. His friends post videos and photos of their growing families. He should’ve had a family. Strings that fray, snap, and break.
Strings of nature. The days have warmed by 40 degrees in a week. Maybe he’d like to hike. Maybe a muddy, brisk four-wheeler ride or a late-afternoon road trip. Suddenly, looking toward spring seems reasonable. Growth is pushing through the dirt. The sun has an optimistic warmth this week — winter may end. I love spring, especially after a long, ugly winter. But these strings are such a knot.
Still, no scissors.
If I take the time, if I have the patience, can I untangle the knot? Must I? What will spring be without my mountain man? Will mushrooms and wildflowers and time on a lake do what the holidays couldn’t? Will the strings hold me together? Hold us together? Or will the strings, once unknotted, fray, snap, and break?
Woods Writes 