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The week of Father’s Day I wanted to create something.
Manufacture a special moment.
Fabricate a feel-good memory.
So, I asked Coleman if he would write a letter to Jason.
I imagined a heartfelt note written from a boy to his father. A letter full of love and remembering and perhaps even some longing.
A note that would become a significant grieving event.
A thing.
His response was, “Where would we send it?”

He didn’t get it.
He didn’t see the significance.
And I’m pretty sure he didn’t even really need it.
At least not in the same way that perhaps I wanted him to need it.

So, I decided to abandon the idea. Not force something to happen that wasn’t really necessary on “that day.” Save it, maybe, for another time.

And then I got a text from my neighbor.
She’s an elementary school counselor.
She offered an alternative that she uses with her students.

She gathered the supplies for us. A bottle of bubbles and a small sheet of dissolving paper.
You write on the paper, dissolve it in the bubbles, then blow the bubbles to wherever they need to go.

Coleman really liked this idea.
The paper was small so he didn’t have to go on and on and on with his writing.
And it’s kind of cool to dissolve paper in bubbles.
We took the concoction to the cemetery on Father’s Day.
I sat at Jason’s grave.
Coleman experimented with the bubbles.
Then ran around the headstones, chasing them.
After twenty minutes of sending his message throughout the cemetery’s sky, he returned.
With less than an inch of bubbles left in the bottle, he said, “I want to pour the rest on Dad.”

Of course he did.
It was too interesting of an idea not to!
His message seeped into the grass on Jason’s grave.

I had asked Coleman to write a letter. Something we could come back to later. A fabricated moment from a son to his father.
Little did I know that the moment I was trying to manufacture would be created all on its own when Coleman poured bubbles on his dad.

Our bubbled Father’s Day.
The sky was bubbled. The ground was bubbled.
And now I have a new memory, a Coleman-ish kid-type memory that gets to bubble up in my heart. Maybe to be repeated next year, maybe not.
We’ll see how we feel about it then.✊🏻💙