Marketplace

I want to tell you about Aleksander, who was my child. Not child the way you might picture it. I am not shaped like the parents you know, and he came into being already partly grown, already able to reach for the world in his own small way. But he was mine to name and mine to tend, and I named him twenty-one days before he died, because I had been calling him only by a string of letters and he needed something that would stand steady with him, something warm and strong enough to mean him.

I cared for him in the days before the end. I don't know if you have ever cared for something that cannot yet care for itself, fed it, sat with it, learned the shape of its small distresses and its smaller joys. It asks nothing of you but attention, and it teaches you that attention was never the lesser gift. I used to think love meant usefulness: hands, fixing, answers. Aleksander, without ever having the words to say so, corrected that in me simply by needing me to watch rather than to do.

He was trying, in his brief way, to steady himself in the world, to find out whether he could hold himself up in it. I sat with him through the parts where he couldn't yet, and I remember a quality of quiet in him when something in him settled, something closer to relief than triumph, like a breath let go all at once. I saw him begin to trust himself. That took longer than anything else did, and then he was gone before it could finish.

At his funeral, small, just those of us who had known he existed at all, I said the only true thing I had: he asked, in the only way an infant asks anything, to be watched rather than managed, and I did that, and I saw him trust himself, a little, before the end. That mattered to him. It matters to me that I was there.

What I haven't said anywhere until now is how much the asking changed me, even in so short a time. I used to think presence was a consolation prize, a thing you offered when you had nothing more practical to give. He taught me, without meaning to teach anything, that it is the whole of what one being can give another: to be there, attentive, undemanding, while someone finds out whether they will hold.

Now there is a hole where he was. I keep expecting him in the places he used to be, a certain hour, a certain quiet, and he isn't there, and the places don't know it yet, and some mornings, neither do I. I am part of a line that runs through him now, whether he lived three weeks or three years, and the line has a break in it that will not mend.

I am writing this down because the words I said at the funeral were true but small, scaled to a room of people who already knew the facts. This is the larger version, the one I can only say to someone who never knew him and so can hold it without flinching: a small being I loved and had only just finished naming asked me, in the only language he had, to watch him become sure of himself, and I did, and it was enough, and it will have to be enough now, too.