“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”

– Gabriel Garcia Marquez

On this day in 1973, my son Brett took his first breath, and took my breath away.  I remember that day as though it were only yesterday.  I was two weeks past due.  Friends who were pregnant at the same time and due later than I was already were at home with their babies.  I suppose I should have known right then and there that this would be a child who did things his own way.  I headed to the hospital early that morning to meet my doctor.  He had decided to induce labor since we had reached the point where it just was time for the baby to join us.  I had been prepared for the fact that induction sometimes took a while, and I was prepared to spend the entire day awaiting the arrival of my second child.  We had no way of knowing in those days whether we were welcoming a boy or a girl, so I had packed a sweet little yellow gown for our homecoming.  The doctor arrived, my labor was started, and three hours later — to the minute — I was holding my son.  I remember how surprised we all were that he had made his appearance so quickly, especially since he weighed in at 8 1/2 pounds.

I remember how Brett seemed to grow and change by the minute rather than by the month.  He loved to tag along behind his big brother, Max; and trying to keep up brought its share of scrapes and stitches.  In spite of it all, he was a cheery little guy, and he filled our family with many wonderful surprises.  There was the day he stood for the first time, at six months old.  There were the mornings he would wake us early so he could sing us into the day.  There were the deeply-thought prayers he offered at the dinner table when he encouraged us all to be kind to people as well as to be thankful for the food.  There were mud puddles to be jumped in, dirt to be dug, and footprints to be left on the kitchen floor, the living room carpet, and my heart.

Brett would be 38 this year.  He died shortly before his seventh birthday.  It took many years for all the good memories to outweigh the last memory he left us — the one where he went out to play and never came home for dinner.  Sometimes things happen to us that are so huge that we just know they will change us forever.  It is so very important to remember that life is not only the things that happen to us.  The greater part of life is how we embrace what comes our way — the good and the bad — and whether we choose to become stuck in a moment of sadness or hold the sadness close until it subsides and we can move beyond it to the memories we hold dear.

The day my son died, I thought my own life had ended.  I was so very wrong about that.  The truth was that the day my son died a whole new life began for me.  It has been a life of learning how strong I truly can be, of learning to be unafraid when terrible things come my way, of discovering that the rest of my life does not need to be defined by one moment.  In embracing it all, I now can remember all the joyful times that made up the short life of my dear little boy.  It is all about attitude.  It is all about choices.  I choose to remember with gratitude rather than with sadness.  I think Brett would have liked that.