Now that I think about it, our winter really arrived about the time of Andy’s first concussion. Christmas weather was benign, with a trace of snow. The new year began placidly; we could play basketball in the driveway and lacrosse on the lawn, and the winter bore all the signs of one of our new winters, quiet and temperate. Around the middle of January everything changed. The clouds gathered, the north winds blew, the snow fell, and the world went bad.
Funny how so much of our mood is directly related to the weather, even in retrospect. I think back over the past few months and see it as a time of cloudiness, gloom, overcast, storms, drear-benighted days, outside and inside. Concussions are inconceivable in the warmth of summer, among the greens, blues and yellows. No one stumbles hazily through the bright months. Concussions are a gray affliction, a cold affliction, a condition of sleet and damp winds.
This morning dawned wet and full of dense fog, so there was no question what sort of day it was. It was another concussion day.
My son woke and initially said he felt fine, temporarily buoying our spirits. Maybe he is all right, we thought. Maybe he can play in the state-championship game. Maybe there is redemption in all of this.
Upon further questioning, he was not all right. He was having intermittent headaches. He could not play in the state-championship game. And I cried.
I cried for myself more than anything, and that is not indefensible. Grief is a selfish act. When we mourn, we cry for ourselves. I cried because I was being deprived of the deep, quenching joy of watching my son play hockey, in the type of game he has always played heroically. At the same time, I had to watch other people’s sons play, and their parents – if they were fortunate enough to see it so – experience that joy.
“Are you mad?” my wife asked. No, I wasn’t mad at anyone other than the person who gave my son a concussion in the first place. I could have laid a baseball bat upside his head at that moment, an act of meaningless bravado made plausible by the fact that he was hundreds of miles away at the moment. I couldn’t be mad at the player who fell down, causing my son to trip and slide into the boards. I was mad at a concussion, but concussions in the late winter don’t leave you many outlets to express your anger. I split a quarter-cord of wood in a blind fury one day, but the mauls and logs were home. All I could do was walk the fog-drenched streets of Verona and cry.
Youth sports force you to operate on several levels, especially if you’re a coach, as I am. The most superficial level exists in the platitudes we use to justify these sports: They build character. They teach teamwork. They provide life skills. They do, but so does a week spent building a cabin, and at the end of that you have a cabin to show for it. At the end of a hockey season you have a duffle full of stinky gear, a bottle of Gatorade, and a pin.
The next level consists of affection for the team. Andy’s hockey team this year was composed of genuinely good guys – not a blown-out ego or head case in the bunch. I like them. I root for them. I wish them well in life. But I wish my own son better.
The deepest and probably truest level is the selfish level: me and my own son, me through my own son, but mainly me. It’s not entirely exploitative; part of what defines family is the family against the world. Good on the family; bad on the non-family. It’s part survival and part identity-building. An entirely selfless family would probably not be much of a family. Youth sports facilitate that, sometimes in unattractive ways. So I don’t apologize for crying over my/my son’s misfortune. Sadness beats rancor or vindictiveness any day.
Yes; the game. Well, you know how it turned out. Andy’s team lost in overtime. Without meaning to exaggerate his skills, his team likely would have won had he played. A day, a tournament, a week, a month, a season tuned to maximize heartbreak delivered the final, least unexpected heartbreak of all.
We cried, shook hands, gathered up the jerseys, loaded the van, and drove back home in a cold, black, unremitting, totally unsurprising rain that later changed to snow.
No comments:
Post a Comment