Seven years ago this October, Kurt and I launched Writing It Real. It would have been Seth Bender’s 27th birthday, had he not died in December, 2000 in a snowboarding accident. The magazine’s first article was “A Special Birthday,” explaining our purpose in offering the magazine so people would have the “right food and the right stuff,” as Seth used to say, to achieve their writing goals. Although Seth’s were usually a hike or a satisfying mountain bike ride, he understood and admired the writer’s needs. He once told me that the only thing wrong with having a poet for a mother was the sound of her Olivetti electric typewriter when he was falling asleep. Now, October marks our publication of, A New Theology: Turning to Poetry in a Time of Grief, the memoir I wrote about how poetry helped me during the months and days and next years after Seth died. This week, our article is the opening of the book’s first chapter.

Proceeds from the book’s publication are going toward the Port Townsend Marine Science Center’s Seth Bender Memorial Camp Scholarship Funds. You can read more about the book and the fund here.

It is with tears and with the joy of loving my son, of having had him in my life, that I continue, and, that in our hearts, we celebrate his 34th birthday. — Sheila

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Curtains closed against the brightness of sunlight on snow. Respirator whooshing and clunking in the dim light. Seth’s chest rising and falling to its rhythm. I cross the threshold of my son’s Denver area hospital room quietly, as if trying not to wake him. Kristen, his fiancée, sits in a chair drawn up to his bedside, her thin frame curved over him like a question mark. Tears spill from her eyes as she massages his hand, letting him know she is there. The sparkle on the engagement ring he’d given her in the summer dips in and out of view as her fingers work his hand. I know she is trying to rub their connection, his spirit, back into him. Her mother, Jackie, rises to hug me, leaving the chair she’s occupied all night. “I am so sorry this is happening to you.”

“To us,” I answer. We were to have been mishpooka, the Yiddish word for the group that becomes a family through marriage.

 “I keep wishing I had asked Seth to spend the whole day yesterday downhill skiing with me,” Kristen says quietly. “But I knew he wanted some time by himself on the slopes after all the family stuff we’d been doing…all the wedding shopping. We were so busy, and everyone was together for days. But I know he would have gone with me. Why didn’t I insist?”

And I think of my boy needing space, getting it from the woman he loved. And I wish he hadn’t needed it. I wish he had stuck with the group and done whatever they did. “Chill, Mom,” he would say to me when I seemed too worried and too frantic about making everything work for everyone involved. But I am not trying to make anything work now. I have known for hours that Seth won’t be waking up. His stepfather, Kurt, won’t be teasing him about the goatee he hadn’t told us about. I won’t be making plans to stay with Seth until we can take him home. Kristen won’t be describing her newly chosen wedding dress. Seth’s sister, Emily, and her new husband, Vijay, won’t be making dinner for all four of them again when they return to Northern California, won’t be installing new software for Seth, fixing his computer compatibility problems, receiving his help on putting their computer desk together. My children’s passions and skills were bringing them together again after years of them going off in different directions to different states. If only they had had more time.

Seth has slipped away from us, though the doctors are still waiting for an angiogram so they can be sure they are right that no blood has been getting to his brain since his snowboarding accident, when he went airborne on a Breckenridge slope and slammed headfirst into a tree. How is it I don’t feel angry with my child for setting out without taking proper precautions, without renting and wearing a helmet? That I am not angry at everybody who was with him for not making him wear one? I know I am in shock, but the truth is I don’t feel angry, and I am not full of blame. Seth is dead, and I have to honor my son. Anger will trivialize this day, make what I need to do impossible. Today, more than ever, my boy is an altar to which we bring our love. His shocking early death not a shock at all, exactly, but a finished poem, something “as it was first perceived to be, a thing always in existence,” as Louise Gluck says of her finished poems. I am sure that I knew he would die young.

As far back as I can remember, since Seth was five, I felt I would lose him. I look at the fit, handsome poem of my boy lying in the bed and remember that Gluck says perceiving the existence of a poem as yet unwritten is to be “haunted by it; some sound, some tone, becomes a torment — the poem embodying that sound seems to exist somewhere already finished.” I worried. I watched him grow. I celebrated and loved this boy, this young man. I tried to figure out which would be safer: mountain biking in the Tucson heat at the University of Arizona or skiing outside of Boulder if he attended the University of Colorado. I worried that he would stand too close to the edge of the Grand Canyon when he and a friend stopped on his way to his sister’s UC Berkeley graduation. I worried the winter he went deep-sea fishing in Mexico with Kristen’s father, Bob. My worry was a torment, something I knew already in existence, something I tried to tell myself was only normal, foolish, mother worrying.

And yesterday it happened. The snow at Breckenridge melted just a little while Seth was eating lunch with Kristen and her family. When he returned for a last run, the melt had frozen over. And then, after no deaths all season on the slopes at Breckenridge, helmet or no, three people died in separate areas. And one of them was Seth, though the doctors were not quite letting go of him yet.

A social worker asks if Emily and Vijay would like to speak with her. I stand there, listening to the respirator’s whoosh, and examine my boy, feel his skin, take in how beautiful he is. I do not know how long I stand there. I do not think about saying goodbye. Kurt knows I have a terrible headache, and he has gone looking for Tylenol.

Seventeen hours ago, when all of our lives were changing, I was on a writing holiday. I’d left my study, my cell phone, and my manuscript for an uninterrupted tea with writer friends I didn’t often see. I returned to my writing house in the early winter dusk. Everything was still except for the persistent red pulse of a message light. I pushed the button and heard a man identify himself as chaplain at the hospital where my son had been helicoptered. At the words “accident on the Breckenridge slopes” and “coma,” I stood paralyzed, hardly able to move my fingers to write down the number to return his call. As I dialed, my anxiety turned to motion. I paced between the kitchen counter and the dining table, thinking this was a close call but not the final poem, only a draft with a different ending, one that would buy more time. What to take to stay in Denver until Seth wakes up from his coma? How would he wake up? Functioning? Would there be a wedding in June? When the chaplain answered, he said doctors were still working on Seth; he said Seth’s dad, Jim, was on his way; he said he thought I might want to come, too.

Mightwant to come? Why would he think I needed to be told to come? I begged the chaplain to connect me to a doctor or a nurse, but he said there was no one available to tell me more. I dialed Jim’s cell phone and caught him on the airport concourse. He told me doctors had put a shunt in to help drain fluid from our son’s swollen brain. He told me there was only a small chance that Seth would survive. I called Kristen’s cell phone, and she spoke to me from the car her father was driving to the hospital where Seth had been helicoptered after the ski patrol found him.

“I’ll be out there as soon as I can get on a plane, Kristen. We’ll get him well. There will be a wedding,” I said hopefully.

“I don’t know,” came the reply in a wavering voice. I had never heard Kristen sound uncertain. I called Emily and Vijay, who were visiting in Seattle, and Kurt at work in Los Angeles. He wasn’t there. His cell was off. Emily and Vijay would keep trying him while I took the ferry to Seattle. Vijay booked us on the first plane out in the morning. Kurt would book his flight to Denver, I thought, as I hurried to pack so I could cross Puget Sound. But when I opened drawers, I couldn’t focus on what I needed. I thought to just get into the car and drive to the ferry without the clothes, but I couldn’t stop shaking. I ran to my neighbor’s. At 4 PM, Discovery Bay, one short block from our houses, was the color of ghosts.

“Seth is unconscious in a hospital in Denver. He was airlifted there. He had a snowboarding accident. Jim said he went at high speed into a tree. I can’t get anything packed.” Ashen, Judy walked back to my house with me and packed me a suitcase with warm clothes, while I paced and nodded my agreement with what she was folding for me. Then she and her husband drove me the hour to the Seattle ferry. Emily and Vijay met me on the Seattle side and brought me to my parents’ house, where they had been visiting while they were up from California.

My father’s advanced Parkinson’s had slowed my parents down considerably. It was a treat for them to have Emily and her husband of six months as overnight guests. So, although she and Vijay had settled at Jim’s as home base for their trip, they had brought a small suitcase to my folks’. It sat unopened.

What does a mother remember from the hours she is waiting to see her son, almost surely dead of a brain injury? The mattresses of her mother’s trundle daybed made up with matching sheets, and the welcoming glow of a small bedside lamp in the guest room. The lingering smell of pot roast from dinner, same as during childhood, when better parents than I kept their children safe.