This grief is like a 600-pound weight, carried all day — and surely for many days to come

Losing a child is like being plucked from normal life and dropped into an alien land. 

Shocked and bewildered, we search through the fog for landmarks or paths, knowing we can never go back to our former life but hoping for something with more clarity than this dark and confusing landscape.

A month in, we are still at the beginning.

Our son Steven joined our family on Christmas Eve of 2004. We had met him a year before when Paul and I and our five children volunteered for three months at a home for street boys in Kisumu, Kenya. When we found out that this sweet, curious child had no known relatives, we pursued adopting him into our family.

We returned to Oregon in March. Nine months of paperwork followed, then Paul flew to Kenya in December 2004, legalized the adoption, finished the paperwork, obtained Steven’s passport and visa, and brought him home.

Within a short time, he was part of our family, school, church and community, developing a reputation as someone who loved generously, made us all laugh, allowed us to love him deeply, and took insane risks.

On one of his first Sundays at church, he had all the moms in a panic when he balanced on the balcony rail, a 3-inch pipe, and walked from one end to the other.

Steven, of course, landed on his feet and laughed, a pattern that was to be repeated a thousand times.

Rather than using the stairs, he liked to climb out his upstairs bedroom window, walk along the porch roof to the limb of a walnut tree, then shimmy down the tree to get in the car to go to school.

One day the limb broke off. Steven rode it twelve feet to the ground and walked away unhurt.

As always, he laughed and made me feel just a bit silly for worrying.

As an adult, he seemed invincible. He surfed and skydived and snowboarded, climbed and hiked, worked as a firefighter, and walked away from car accidents.

On Sundays at noon, and randomly throughout the week, he would pop in the back door with a hug for me. Always, he left with another hug and a heartfelt, “I love you, Mom.”

He had come to us with a headful of ideas about how the world worked that often conflicted with his nerdy and logical family’s opinions. “If you see a big snake, you take a stick and break it in seven pieces, and that will break the snake’s back,” he informed us.

Of course, his siblings insisted this didn’t make logical sense.

Steven lifted his chin confidently and said, “God’s will!” Because, of course, if it was God’s will, that would trump all their reasoning.

It became a common phrase in our family to explain the unlikely.

At some point, I decided if he had survived all his exploits so far, I could quit worrying about him because he was going to be with us, safe and well, until it was God’s will that he wasn’t.

I talked to him on the phone on Nov. 1,  my Saturday night ritual of checking to see if he could come for Sunday dinner. He sounded sick. Yeah, he said, he has a fever and he’s vomiting. But I was not to worry, as he was doing all he could to stay hydrated.

The next morning, I am told, he got up to use the bathroom, stopped in the kitchen to talk to his friend about coming to our house for dinner, and collapsed.

The paramedics couldn’t revive him. That quickly, he was gone. He was 30 years old.

As a family, we are devastated.

Endlessly, I ponder the hundreds of times I worried about his safety and the bizarre fact that he passed away in a warm house after two days of a nasty but seemingly normal flu. Even though I see little Steven, in my mind, lifting his chin with a confident, “God’s will!” I still find it completely incomprehensible.

The other children flew in from around the country and the world, and we put together a funeral service to honor Steven and his legacy of helping others and making everyone feel like they were the most important person in the room.

Mercifully, hundreds of people supported us through visits, phone calls, cards, attending the visitation and funeral, and helping with costs. We were not left to cope alone.

A month after his passing, grief is a 600-pound California sea lion draped across my shoulders. I’ve named him Ralph, this heavy sadness that refuses to move. I carry him, step by slow step, when I walk to Alford Cemetery to visit Steven’s grave. When I distract myself with a book or cleaning project, Ralph adjusts his position and nudges me with a flipper, and I know he’s still there, all 600 pounds.

Every year since 2004, we have prepared a Kenyan dinner on Christmas Eve to celebrate Steven joining our family. We spread colorful lesos on the table, serve soft drinks in glass bottles, decorate with carved elephants, and cook traditional Kenyan food.

Steven always made a corn mush called ugali and chapatis, a type of flatbread, expertly stirring and rolling with a knack learned at the children’s home and never forgotten.

This Christmas Eve, God willing, we will again cook a Kenyan dinner. In addition to celebrating Steven joining our family, it will also be a memorial to his leaving us. We are not sure how to go on, but we know we were blessed to love and be loved by him for 21 years, and we pray that that love lights the way forward in this dark and confusing place.