Finn’s Wake

A Small Story of Untimely Things That Asks, “What Color is a Quilt?”

It was the first sunny morning in a summer of rainy days when we gathered for his wake in a room without a roof under a too blue sky. Nearly a year had passed since this tall, handsome teen took his life and yet the grief felt fresh, settled and waiting, like a low-pressure cloud cover that hovered but would not rain. His face was everywhere, Finnish to his name, in the photos and slideshow. It was familiar to me because he looks like his mother, my friend of decades. So much, though, was not familiar–the sound of his laugh, the way light changed the color of his eyes, the subtle subtext of his smiles. I didn’t know how his voice sounded after it changed or the cadence of his walk or how he held his body at rest. 

His mother and I have a deep connection, but we have not been in each others’ everyday lives for years. We saw each other here and there, always planning to meet up, but it was her son’s death that finally brought us face to face on her sofa. We sat together then, in the way that old friends can, with nothing between us, sharing easily as if the years were minutes. As we talked that day though, I realized the years were not minutes; they had encompassed the lifetime of her son, and I had missed it. I did not know him, and now, I never would. The whole of this loss sank me, like a boulder rolling into a lake. Death had taken the hope and left the wanting. 

Months later at his wake, photos of his life showed him, but it wasn’t enough. I wanted to open the photos like covers of magical books that would let me walk into his story and get the measure of him. I wanted to know more than what he looked liked and what he accomplished. I wanted to know his energy and his sound, what he thought and what he cared about, what made him laugh and what made him mad. But there is no such book. Not for him or any of us. When we are gone, we leave only puzzle pieces scattered around in images and items, accomplishments and memories. But scraps were all I had, so I collected them to see what they could reveal about this person gone too soon. 

From the stories and pictures of Finn that were shared at the memorial, I started to see a contrarian who couldn’t accept the world as it was, who wouldn’t make himself small and quiet. He was a guy with all the gifts, a literal golden boy—hair, eyes, skin–who quickly excelled at whatever he tried, but generously helped others. Taskmaster and Samaritan, he was a warrior and a button pusher; a young man on fire who couldn’t turn down his own flame. I quickly loved this complex person whose soul had so much light and dark, but who was not at all cold. Instead, he seemed to be heat incarnate, as if he had the power to warm or burn you, like a campfire giving way to coals. 

His math teacher, who was clearly also a friend, said that he will always see Finn, a math and science prodigy, in the Perseids that were dancing unseen above us on that August day. Many others also described Finn as a comet, a light, something corporeal, but not quite earthly. There was a story about Finn wanting to dance on a flatbed truck in front of their van when they were stuck in traffic. A petite girl shared that he carried her backpack for her on a long hike. 

When the stories were done, mourners moved about sluggishly, weighted from sadness. I still had so many blank spaces in my collage of Finn, but I tucked the pieces I had into my pocket, edges shorn and shredded, a suggestion of a pattern, yet the samples were too small to see him clearly. I vowed to stitch them together, hoping to know the true color of him. I lingered outside the roofless room and found it hard to step into the rest of the day. I thought back to the year before when I was sitting with his mother, and how she seemed to me like a phoenix burnt by life, roasted red and ashen. Naked. Fragile. At the wake, dressed in black with a scarf that matched the sky, it looked like her feathers were growing back. She had survived the unsurvivable, but not unscathed: like all burn victims, she had scarred patches where no feathers would ever grow. As I stood outside the door, unable to stay but not ready to go, I looked around to see emerald aspen leaves quivering in the gentle breeze. I usually see these as sweet small waves hello, but that day they looked like a thousand tiny shoulders shaking with sobs. 

Because we weren’t in the habit of talking, days passed without me telling her things I wanted her to know.  Like how much I loved hearing stories of Finn and could have gone on listening for hours, but what was shared seemed just right. Like how beautiful the service was, and how the setting was so lyrical in the restored historical building. After reinforcing the stone walls, they found the structure was unable to hold a roof, so there it stood, contained like a hug but open to the sky, just like my friend.  Even the building’s name, the Transfer Warehouse, was perfect, because on that day we were exchanging stories and hugs and sorrow and solidarity.

In the days after the memorial, the Finn I was forming in my mind was a person whose parts didn’t easily merge, each one too alive with its own agenda. He was a dancer and a swordsman. He was a photographer who took images of flowers and guns. He built computers and won tournaments and yet volunteered to teach others math. I imagined it must have been so hard for his mother–the one he surely turned to–to help him stitch himself back together when his seams of contradiction did not hold. 

There was so much I wanted to tell her, but it was not our habit to talk, so I failed to let her know that I thought she had been a great mother to this fireball of a boy. It was clear that she tried so hard to give him everything he needed, but in the end, as every parent learns, she was only able to give him what she had, but she gave him all of that. I also wanted to tell her that she is a great mother right now for choosing to let the hardest hit a person can survive break her heart every day–over and over and over again–so it won’t break her spirit, because she needs that spirit to go on. And so much going on remains.

Instead of calling her, I pursued the Perseids that I had yet to see. I searched in the dark before dawn and after dusk, but morning after morning and evening after evening, the clouds or the moon or my husband or my daughters or my comfy bed got in the way. At home, my patch of sky is made small by trees and hillsides and houses, but even when I was camping above treeline—with all the stars and all the sky—I saw no shooting stars. It felt like Finn was testing my resolve and would not be easily seen. 

When I read her poem about the mala of bells she rang for him on the anniversary of his death, I realized I had missed again when I didn’t reach out to her on that impossible day. I was in my own life welcoming home my daughter from college with her new service dog and her new boyfriend. I was thinking of Finn so much, so why didn’t I remember?  I looked for closure in her poems, or at least a calm abiding, but instead found more longing for this unique person I did not know and never would. It was like I had discovered the existence of an exotic species just after it became extinct. 

The next evening, after a day of mudslides and near constant rain, I stepped  outside and was shocked to see that my small bit of sky was clear with the most stunning starfield I had seen in weeks, maybe months. I grabbed a glass of wine and headed to the hot tub, thinking maybe I would see a shooting star, but then laughing and letting go. I settled in and sipped and was almost finished with my wine when I saw a large burst of light in my peripheral vision, just above the horizon: big, bold, brilliant and blazing fast. Had it not been for its size and sheer star power, I might have wondered if it was ever really there. 

Finn. 

I felt lucky and so thankful in that moment, like I had caught a flash of cosmic light that could fill in all the blank spaces in the incomplete picture of my friend’s son. In truth, it gave me nothing more of Finn than I already had. In thinking he was the shooting star, I saw that he also was the blank of sky left behind; something that changes us by its presence and then its absence. 

The next day after my daughter headed back to college, I felt the now familiar empty space that remains in her absence, a room inside of me that is held just for her and feels hollow when she is gone. I thought, too, about what I have given her—a childhood in nature, meals of whole food she often didn’t like, adventures in wilderness and cities, skating lessons and ski passes and hockey dues and my time–so much of my time. Listening and advising and laughing and yelling and crying and trying and trying to see what she needed so I could give it to her only to learn, like my friend, that I could only give what I had, and I rarely felt like it was enough. My daughter was barely out of sight when I tried to busy myself out of the micro-grief I feel every time we say goodbye. But I know that she will return and light up that space inside of me. What about Finn’s mother? Does she have such a space inside of her that is Finn-shaped and left empty, like Elijah’s chair, ever ready for an unlikely return?  

Inside her Finn-shaped hole, I imagine, are scraps of him—his laugh and his smile, his walk and his voice, his jokes and his thoughts. I see her sitting in the hallowed space, stitching them together, these pieces of her son, so she won’t lose a single one to time or the wind. Soon she will have a blanket that is unbearably light and covers but is never warm. It is not easy to describe since it is made of grief and hope and anger and joy and despair and new feelings that she cannot name—all emotions that, when joined, become the unnamable color of love.