Terminal.
On November 3rd 2010, my son Lev died suddenly, but not unexpectedly in the children’s hospital where he spent nearly a third of his short life. He died inside the skeleton of an airport. An airport that had, some years earlier, begun its redevelopment into a master planned community with a state of the art children’s hospital as its crown jewel; the hospital built high on a hill made of crushed runways.

When Lev was born in July of 2007, the children’s hospital was just two weeks old. The parking lots were not yet paved, and there were no signs. As I came and went to visit my baby in the ICU each day, I dodged sloppy puddles of muddy central Texas clay soil outside. Inside, I made note of landmarks so I could find my way back out of the bowels of the hospital to my car. During the wet summer & fall of Lev’s first many-months long stay in the airport, Austin’s yearly black cricket plague filled the hospital hallways with hopping insects. Everything was new and perfect and a mess, like my kid.
As metaphorical devices go, the airport is a bit of a bullseye. Dying in an airport allows the notion of death as flight, exiting this plane & ascending to whatever’s next — a journey from mortal to immortal. Death as departure. No return ticket. And here we are.
Sunday was the ninth anniversary of Lev’s leaving. He died very early in the morning. Dark skies. The city asleep, quiet and still. He died where he’d spent almost a full year of days over the course of his three years, three months and 19 days on earth. He died where I worked. I took a job in the children’s hospital when Lev was a few months old and I left in late 2016, almost six years to the day after Lev died. In 2017, I bought a new house, here, in the old airport. Lev’s ashes sit in my office, on the groundfloor of my home in this impressively re-conceived airport, less than one mile from where my son died.
As begins the last year of the first decade beyond the event horizon of my life to date, I am calling my shot. I will take the next year of days to reflect in this space on what I remember of the before, what the after looks like in the rearview. Visit often for essays and bite-sized takes on happiness, love, family, friends, choices, inevitabilities, patterns, fear, humor, memes, force-of-will, and joy. And wherever the day takes me.
Cheers, y’all.