It was the first time I’d seen my son play
baseball. Little League; the summer before he started middle school. Just a
practice, not a game.
We’d never been sports guys, my son or I. Nothing
against sports, the topic just never created much of a blip on the Taylor
family radar. To the best of my recollection, the closest we ever came to
sports was tossing a Frisbee at the beach. Which made it all the more impressive
that Jordan was good. Real good.
His coach took me aside prior to the start
of practice to complement me on all the work I’d put in with my son. He was
surprised when I asked him what work he was talking about. Jordan was a
natural. He could pitch, he could hit, he could run like the wind. None of that
came from my side of the family.
But like I said, he was good. I stayed the
entire practice. As the team ran through its exercises, Jordan kept watch on me
from the corner of his eye, gauging my reaction, making sure I was paying
attention. I was. I was about as proud as a father can be of his son.
I was proud of him long before that,
though. Not for his sports prowess, but for something far more important:
Jordan was a genuinely good kid, a good person.
He had a big heart, a giving nature, empathy that stretched for miles. If the
people around him weren’t happy, Jordan wasn’t happy.
By way of example, I began giving Jordan
and his sister an allowance when he was six or seven. Just a couple bucks; a
fortune to kids that age. That first week, he and Aubreii walked to a little
gift shop two blocks from our front door. He came home with a small, plastic
statue of a puppy. For me. He’d spent the first real money he’d ever had on a
gift for me.
I still have that puppy and I hope to one
day be buried with it.
Many years later, while working in New York
City, Jordan risked his life to buy me a knock-off Rolex from a shady-looking
guy in a truck parked in a back alley near Canal Street, home of shady-looking
guys selling bootlegged luxury items. His phone went off while he was making
the deal and the shady guy pulled a gun on him, thinking he might be a cop, or
working for the cops. Jordan managed to convince him otherwise and purchased
the “Rolex” for $45.
Why would my otherwise intelligent son do
something so stupid? Because when he’d asked me if he could pick me up a
souvenir from the Big Apple, I’d said, “Sure, get me a Rolex!”
It was a good knock-off, too. Even fooled the jeweler who resized the band
for me. But it was nothing for which I was willing to risk my son’s safety. It was that important to Jordan, though,
because he wanted to make me happy. He cared what I felt, what I thought of
him.
He was like that.
Last Sunday, I listened as weeping friends
and relatives shared similar stories. About how much he’d meant to them, how
much kindness he’d shown over the years, how many people he had helped, how
many lives he’d made better just by being the kind of guy he was.
The next day we buried him. He’d just
turned 37 and the world is a poorer place without him in it.
His sister, younger brother and I perched
on metal folding chairs in the cold, grey morning light of the cemetery as they
lowered his casket into the frozen earth. The best of me went into that hole
with him. I’d always thought of Jordan as the me I should have been; kinder, less self-absorbed, more caring. What
sort of universe takes someone like him while someone like me lingers?
It’s not fair and I’m mad as hell. I don’t
want to hear about faith, a “better place,” being called home … any of that. Maybe
someday, not now. Now all I want is to see my boy again. For a day, an hour. A
few minutes.
That’s not going to happen. Ever. And I just
can’t come to grips with that.
I want to tell him, one last time, how much
I love him. How proud I always was of him. How much I’ve always cherished that plastic
puppy statue, the video I shot that day at Little League practice, that damned
Rolex.
But he’s gone where I can’t follow, that
place where phone calls, texts, emails go forever unanswered. He’s gone. He’s
gone. I could write that a million times and I still wouldn’t believe it.
I’ve had friends over the years who have
lost children. I’ve never understood how they manage to go on. Now I know. You
go on because you must, because you have no choice.
If you have little ones, even if they’re
37, don’t wait to tell them — to show them — how much they mean to you. We are,
each of us, allotted only so many days on this green earth and when they’re
gone, they’re gone for good. All we’re guaranteed is now, and even that is as ephemeral as an early morning’s
mist tenuously clinging to a cornfield.
For my part, I plan to be better than I’ve
been. Kinder, fairer, more loving. My son’s passing has left the world a little
short on goodness. I hope to do my part to pick up that slack, in his memory. I
don’t know how successful I’ll be at the task — God knows it doesn’t come
naturally to me — but I want to try. For my boy.
(616) 745-9530
