Eight-Legged Starfish

Brady loved thunderstorms.

We spent several spring breaks on Sanibel Island, where storms rolled across the ocean quickly and dramatically on otherwise sunny afternoons. Most people groaned when rain interrupted their beach day, but not Brady. He loved every second.

He loved watching dark clouds gather in the distance; he loved the crack of thunder rolling across the water. He loved lightning flashing across the sky, and the mist that would creep through the balcony screens as rain pounded the ocean below us.

After the storms passed, we would head down to the beach together searching for shells and treasures the tide had tossed ashore. One year the shoreline was covered in starfish. They were unusual, with eight arms instead of five, and Brady was fascinated by them. We spent the morning walking up and down the beach gently tossing stranded eight-legged starfish back into the ocean one by one.

Brady never saw storms as something stealing joy. He saw them as part of it: the excitement of knowing one was brewing, the awe of watching it roll in, the anticipation of discovering what it might leave behind afterward to delight us.

May has been filled with good things. The weather is warming up, and sunshine is good for my soul. School is wrapping up for the girls after a year that kicked off with the unbearable weight of losing their brother. In a few days, we leave for Paris, a exciting trip that had once was completely impossible with Brady’s extensive medical needs. But grief has a way of making even extremely beautiful things feel complicated. You can be genuinely excited and deeply grateful for a trip to Paris that you thought you would never take, while desperately missing the person who should be there beside you on the plane. That is the weird tension of profound loss. You keep living because there is no other choice. You keep laughing and traveling and making memories and stepping into new seasons of life. But you do all of this with the constant awareness that someone you love deeply should be there to witness it with you, and isn’t.

All those rainy days on a Sanibel balcony left me with some wisdom that helps me now, in the wake of losing Brady. Storms do not have to impart their gloom. There can still be wonder inside them. Even in the hardest years, maybe especially in the hardest years, Brady somehow kept teaching us this: to find unexpected joy in the complicated moments. I miss him terribly.

Maybe one of the most surprising things about suffering is that storms are not only about what they take. Sometimes they reveal things too. Deeper tenderness, intense gratitude, unexpected resilience and a clearer understanding of what actually matters. And at times, eight legged starfish and a passel of conch shells.

Brady understood that instinctively. He never feared storms. He ran to the balcony to watch them roll in. He was quick to find delight during them, and in their aftermath.

It rained today, briefly, and I saw a rainbow. A full one! Brady always considered rainbows a very personal gift from heaven. When he could still talk, he would say: Mom, that one was for me.

I miss you, Goose. Every day is one day closer to seeing you again.