Standing on the Tip of an Iceberg

There is no good way to tell you this. 

I was trying to vacation the old fashioned way, burying my phone deep within my beach bag, even leaving it in the room for long stretches. Service was spotty anyway, and since I still cannot grasp the difference between roaming data and cellular data and wifi data (is there such a thing?) I had pretty much disabled everything to avoid being charged for all the junk that continues to pile up, no matter how hard I try to unsubscribe.

There is no good way to tell you this.

Really, I had only retrieved my phone to check the time. 3:03 p.m. The sun seemed too high in the sky for it to be that late, but Mexico is funny that way, keeping itself in one arbitrary time zone. And placing a gleaming new Starbucks outlet only inches before the airport security checkpoint, neglecting to mention there is an identical one just past the metal detectors, where nobody will confiscate your expensive brew.

There is no good way to tell you this. I pressed pause, needed a final moment before I could let her tell me. The last text I had received from her, one of my dearest friends, less than twenty-four hours earlier, was a series of pictures from her trip to South America. Standing on the tip of an iceberg, was the first caption. I didn't look down, she assured me. 

We don't look down. If we did, we would never have the nerve to make the climb. And no, there was no good way for her to tell me what she was about to tell me, that her son, Adam, had died that morning. Her twenty-seven year old son, a child I have known since he was two, when his tongue would catch on something every time he took a stab at a hard "c." Milk and "tookies." A child whose only shortcoming, as far as I can recall, was an inability to pronounce "cookies." At twenty-seven, he still referred to me, sometimes, as mom.

Back in those early days, we were kind of a blended family, passing the long afternoons together in each others' basements, dining on pizza or macaroni and cheese with our children while our husbands worked late. The kids attended day camp together in the summer. Adam had a friend, a boy, with long hair. One afternoon, when I picked them up, my daughter couldn't wait to tell me about the girl with a penis. Those were the days, when they were young enough to change together for swimming, when they were young enough to volunteer information about their day. They were often inaccurate, but they didn't lie.

We migrated to the same suburb within six months of each other. Different elementary schools, different middle schools, but we were still family. We picked up others along the way. We were snowballs rolling uphill, growing families gathering strength as we gathered each other, looking out for each other always, but never looking down.

We teeter together, now, on the tip of that iceberg, all of us who have rolled up that hill together, raising kids and raising each other and, sometimes, raising hell. Pushing each other up and picking each other up on the way. We have lost one, one of our children. That is not the way it's supposed to play out.

Looking down won't help.  It never does. All we can do is hold on to each other.