This is heavy. There isn’t a read more button because tumblr. But scroll past if you need to.
On July 16th, 2010, a boy was born.
His name was Geo. I suppose at first glance there wasn’t anything terribly remarkable about him. He was a boy. He was impossibly small. And he was ours
This is him.
I missed out on my opportunity to stand on the plastic hospital chair and sing Circle of Life. There would’ve been enough people there to play every Giraffe, Zebra and Elephant. He was the cornerstone of a family that felt smaller without him there. He was impossibly bigger than all of us.
I say ‘was’, because at 7:45pm on May 19th, 2013, he was sitting outside in the patio of a restaurant with his family when a drunk driver drove into the building and killed him instantly.
I don’t have any commentaries for you today. No greater thoughts on actions and consequences, on childhood and time, on grieving, on what it means to watch a mother and father carry a child who could’ve been sleeping, begging for him to wake up. Nothing to explain what is happening in the moments when the father clings to a body knowing that it would be the last time he would ever get to hold his son. And when it was finally time to take him away, the mother crouches down, wearing the same floor length flowered dress she wore when she told her son to stop clambering on the back of the chair, and tells the father to let go, that the soul is gone, that he’s only carrying a shell. I have nothing in my finite years to give reason to the father’s reply: “He told me he would come back.”
He could’ve been sleeping. He was almost three.
When I sat outside the hospital room carrying a little boy - Geo’s little brother - I sang Frere Jacques, the only lullaby I knew from start to finish, the same lullaby I used to sing to Geo when he was being fussy and wouldn’t sleep. The woman sitting next to me looked at me and said, ‘Geo used to sing that song.’
I cried. I cried because that’s what you do when the boy you used to sing to went on to sing that song without you. That was my mark. A lullaby about going to sleep.
My family is insane and chaotic and nuclear. We are forever not on speaking terms because it’s too complicated to write out the terms and conditions for when it’s okay to be too close to each other. We are mutually assured destruction at our finest.
But none of that matters when people die. When a child dies. The only thing that matters is that we cry. We cry because that’s what you do when the boy who was impossible large became so impossibly quiet.
I don’t know what I believe in. But if there’s a heaven, an afterlife, a blossoming into a bigger salvation, then I know that the place was dark and dim before Geo walked in, and turned on the light.
RIP Geo Mounsef.
I love you.
