"Hello, spider"
Today marks five years since we lost Jackson. Five years feels like a long time, in the abstract - yet I can still very-vividly picture him - can feel him sitting on my hip, bare legs in the sticky August heat, running around our new house cackling. Five years is enough time to have a year of grieving, to have two more kids, to have our entire world change around us.
And yet, I can also vividly remember those early seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months.
Time is strange like that - and the change that comes with it sometimes feels gradual, like erosion, or swift, like a river jumping its bank. After awhile, the landscape is unrecognizable - but it's very-much shaped by its past.
For us, our community carried us through those early weeks.
I recall a concept of "concentric circles of grieving", which still sticks with me:
Natalia and I are in the middle, with family and friends in increasingly-distant concentric rings. (The idea is that the inner rings can lean on the outer ones, but that the inner grievers should avoid carrying outer-rings' burdens - whether that's work, or others' expectations of grief, or showing up to some event.)
At first, it's this really simple diagram - concentric rings, or a hub-and-spoke. That community support made all the difference - having family together, no expectations, "plans without commitments", and all the rest. We moved in with my parents for a couple weeks, Natalia's family came up from California. I walked alone in Discovery Park for hours - at one point, a stranger asked if I was okay, and when I said my son had just died two days ago, I found myself getting a hug in the woods from a stranger.
Grief turns out to be this near-universal experience. If you haven't really felt it yet, it'll find you some day - it's part of loving somebody. Friends just started opening up to us about their own grief in ways we hadn't expected. My friend Trevor, on maybe day five, how he'd felt when he lost his dad - that it's a black hole that never goes away, but "nice things start to grow around the edges".
When the one-year mark rolled around, we wanted to gather our community again, to thank all of you, and find a way to remember Jackson. That's our Flower Walk, which we do every September on a weekend between his birthday (the 11th) and the anniversary of his death (the 20th).
We gathered at Green Lake, everybody had these blue shirts and pink wristbands, and we walked around the lake together.
A curious, wonderful thing has happened in these five years: we keep having these walks, people keep wearing these shirts, we're all doing kindness acts in his memory, and we're starting to find that, perhaps, that simple hub-and-spoke diagram is turning into something much more beautiful: a spiderweb.
See, what keeps happening is that people who gave us support, have started to find each other, in strange little ways. We've got friends who are out walking with their blue shirts on, only to get approached by a neighbor who, turns out, also has one of our blue shirts at home.
A friend saw our Jackson Kindness Cards showing up in a strangers' post on social media, on the other side of the country - we have some clues like this that these cards are just circulating all over the place.
One of Natalia's psychology supervisors had a patient just randomly bring a kindness card to their session, because that patient had randomly found Natalia's guest episodes on Charlie Swenson's podcast, found this website, printed out the cards, and brought it with a small gift for their psychologist. All of this taking place across the country with no upstream connection to us.
This year, a family was at their kid's soccer game, only to realize that another family at the field was wearing the same Jackson shirts. These two families' kids were soccer teammates but the families had no idea they were connected in this way.
Beyond these coincidental encounters, there are so many of you who have grown closer since Jackson's passing. You're forming and growing these connections in these "outer rings" of that grief diagram, and it's so beautiful to see.
At his service, I told this little story about Jackson and spiders:
When we moved to our current place in August, there were spiders in the yard and on the porch.
In the evenings, Jackson and I would often sit on the front steps, and he’d toddle around in his new yard, listening for fire trucks in the distance. On one evening, he encountered a spider making a web next to our door.
Natalia is terrified of spiders. When a spider appears on the wall, I’m the one who handles the situation while she flees for safety.
Jackson, like all kids, learned through imitation. I wanted him to learn that spiders are helpful and harmless, at least on this side of the mountains. So, we’re sitting outside on the porch, and I say “Hello, Spider. Have a nice day.”
From then on, every time we saw a spiderweb, Jackson would say “Hello, Spider. Have a nice day.” Now, whenever I see one, I hear his voice echoing that little greeting.
One massive gift from Jackson is how these Flower Walk shirts, kindness cards, and friendships are growing-around-the-edges of this grief. In a way, he's teaching _us_ to approach things that might otherwise seem scary, but are really quite harmless: approaching a stranger, sharing kindness, saying hello, keeping in touch.
So: five years on, and our concentric-ring-thing looks like an early page in The Very Busy Spider. That web is clearly larger than we'll ever know, which truly has me in awe.
Thank you, as ever, for your love and support - and beyond us, please also share that kindness with others around you, friends and strangers alike. Grief and suffering are universal experiences, and sometimes it's just a bit of validation and kindness that can carry somebody.
You never know who could really use a kindness card today - and they might even have a blue shirt of their own tucked underneath their jacket.