Dear Dalton,

It has been 10 months now and yet it feels like you left us yesterday.  Every memory I have of you alive that day is etched in my mind with these little time stamps.  At 10:25am I text you and said “If you bring food upstairs again, you won’t have a guest over for 2 months.”  We both knew that was a lie.  At 11:47am I told you to stop shooting Tyler with a BB gun because I could hear the sound of the shots, Tyler running, and you laughing.  I reminded you about baseball practice the coming Tuesday from 6-8pm in Darren’s barn at 12:18pm.  I passed you on the ranger at 2:27pm and noticed you didn’t have your seatbelt on and that is when I called you to tell you to buckle up.  At 3pm you whizzed by me to say you just came inside to get a pair of gloves for Tyler.  I have replayed that scene thousands of times in my head in the last 10 months.  You looked cold and your hair was a mess as usual.  You still had on the same clothes that you wore the day before.  Everything about that Saturday was so ordinary.  Finally all consciousness of time fades away from 3:30pm on.

Grandma Peg called me yesterday to ask me if I had thought anymore on a headstone for your gravesite.  I said not really.  I have never drug my feet so badly on a subject.  The thought of your headstone destroys me.  Dad too.  It just feels so final.  I don’t want you to just be another headstone at the cemetery.  It is important to me that people don’t just walk by you and briefly acknowledge your name.  Above all, it’s the little dash between the year you were born and the year you died that bothers me the most.  How can 13 1/2 years be symbolized by a simple dash?

What happened in place of the dash is too much to fit on any headstone.  It began in Dr. Zielke’s office in November 2000 when I first heard your heartbeat and you were the size of a jelly bean.  I remember holding you right after you were born and wondering how the heck you got all that black hair.  After we brought you home, Keely would hold you and kiss your face over and over while she pretended you were her own baby.  When you were 2 years old, I tried to teach you to say your name.  You would point at your chest and say, “DD.”  That nickname would go on to stick your whole life.  Your dad got the brilliant idea of getting you a 4-wheeler power wheel when you were only 3.  Shortly after that, I would find myself stopping traffic and running after you in the street because you would try to drive it to Papa’s house.  Also about that time, you had to be watched every second in Mass.  One day you shimmied through several people to get to the aisle so you could run up to see Father Sam.  He gave you a wink as he was holding the consecrated host high up in the air and never said a word.

Nowhere in the dash of a headstone is everywhere you have been and the things you have done.  People passing by won’t have a clue about all you had the opportunity to do.  You have watched the Cubs play at Wrigley Field. You have fed dolphins at Sea World and been to Universal Studios in Florida and California (not to mention you have been to Disneyworld three times).  Remember how tired you were when we got to our hotel in Shanghai?  Yeah… you slept for 22 hours and then woke up in the middle of the night hungry and ready to sightsee.  Then there was that time in Paris when you were bored out of your mind at the Louvre and you told me to hurry up and look at the Mona Lisa so we could leave.  Naturally you also hurried me to take the family picture in front of the Eiffel Tower so you and Colton could get back to the hotel and “play football.”  More recently, you begged to go to the Great Wolf Lodge.  You spent five hours in the arcade blowing all the cash you got for Christmas.  You traded all your tickets in for some off-brand Beats headphones.  Less than a week after earning those headphones, you left them on the sofa and Jake ate them.  How could anyone forget when the Nicholson’s came to visit us and you were swimming with Brady and Brooke?  You hammered a tennis ball right into Brooke’s face and then told her mother that it wasn’t your fault she had “butter fingers.”   Just yesterday I went to turn on the ceiling fan above the hot tub.  Remember that one?  You and Canon were playing basketball and you threw the ball up so hard it broke off one of my fan blades.  You did a terrible job hiding the missing blade and when I asked you about it you said you weren’t sure what happened and you really thought the ceiling fan just came with four blades.

I know I must design your headstone eventually, and I will.  For now, I’m still stuck thinking about the dash.  So much happened between 2001 and 2014 that can’t fit on a block of cement.  Perhaps that is why I share it all in this blog.  Maybe my purpose is to minister to others about God through you.  I try talking to Dad about you but he can’t.  He just cries.  His dreams for your future are crushed and he misses your face.  He says he no longer expects you to walk into the kitchen and sit down for breakfast with him.  I guess you could say that reality is starting to set in for him.  If there is any way God would allow you to give your dad a sign that you are okay, it would mean everything.  The Father’s Day visit was beyond our expectations.  That made us feel the best we have since the accident.  It might sound crazy, but I still text you and snap chat you.  I tag you on FB posts and I look through your Instagram account frequently.  I know you would be embarrassed about that, but I’m the mom.

DD, please prepare a place for the rest of us that are waiting to join you some day.  I dream about kissing your face and then you milking my fingers because I’ve kissed you.  Does Jesus have Dr. Pepper in Heaven?  You have got to tell me that when I get there.  How about sunflowers seeds?  I miss all of the shells you left inside my freshly made bed when you knew there was no food allowed in the bed.  SURELY there are sunflower seeds in heaven.  Maybe  you have met Grandma Meckel and Sherry.  Tell them both I love them.

Finally I want you know they tried everything to save you.  I just pray it was instant and you felt no pain.  You are still my little boy and I worry about that stuff.  And let’s agree not to stress out too much about the dash for now.

Love,

Momma

P.S. Only with God’s blessing, can you try to send Dad a sign that you are okay?  He needs it.