24

Last week was Ada's birthday and anniversary of her death.

I was not as sad this year as a I used to be about it, I don't know why. Maybe there is other sadness in my life that clouds Ada's star. Maybe because my other children are mostly grown, that I don't feel like a parent much anymore. I'm still a mom, of course, but a different kind of mother than I used to be, no longer managing or directly involved in the day-to-day of my kid's lives.

Sunday afternoon, Pedro came downtown. We went to lunch, and afterwards we were going to do something outside in the beautiful, warm, sunny day, but the forest fire smoke was thick in the air. I was tired, so we stayed in and watched a YouTube documentary about the history of the Seattle Mariners. The day before, the Mariners were eliminated from the playoffs in three games to Houston. 

The weird thing about baseball is that one pitch, one hit, one catch can charge the course of a club. Seasons are made up of hundreds of pitches and at bats. There is this sense of wonder I saw for the first time in the millions of crazy random stats kept by baseball historians: what would have happened if...? There are a million possible permutations. The Mariners had David Ortiz in their minor league farm team before he played for the Twins and the Red Sox. What if Big Papi had played for the Mariners? How good would the Mariners have been?

So it goes when you lose a child. Thousands of permutations arise of how life might have be different, what paths might have gone down that I didn't. It can be haunting and hard to figure out, until one day time heals the wound, and acceptance arrives with its friend gratitude. I will never be grateful that Ada died, but I can be grateful for the life that followed. My friend Marta recommended a book of poetry Every Word You Cannot Say by Iain S. Thomas that she is reading after her husband's death. There is a passage:

You love again.

Recycle your heart.

Someone out there needs it.