Sarah Yvonne

Another Israeli airstrike has hit central Beirut. My social media feeds are filled with images of fiery explosions, collapsed buildings, a crater in the ground and frantic rescue workers. At least 29 people dead. I see the strike was in Basta, on Mamoun Street. I think I know where that is, and I jump on Google Maps to confirm. As I thought, it is just a few streets back from the way I used to walk home to our first apartment in Beirut. Not right in our old neighbourhood, but close enough that if we had still been there, I would have felt the building shake.

As I peruse the streets of Beirut on Google Maps, my fingers absentmindedly scroll over to our old street in Sursock and I hit on street view. It takes me to the back of our apartment, the way I used to walk with Isaac to a local garden. The street where he fell into fits of giggles one morning at the sight of a cat rolling on the ground in the sun. He waved enthusiastically to the cat, saying “bonjour chat noir, bonjour chat noir!” A photo I took of him laughing now adorns his headstone.

I scroll down that street and around the corner, past the vibrant fuchsia bougainvillea spilling over a wall and into the walkway. I used to pick some for Isaac as we walked past and he would carry it all the way to wherever we were going, examining it closely, holding it up to me saying “pink flower”. The street we sprinted down, Isaac limp in my husband’s arms, to get to the main road and find someone to take us to a hospital.

I scroll around another corner. Onto our street. The top of St Nicholas Stairs. The café we would visit on Sunday afternoons where Isaac and I would share a lemonade. The café next door where – on the last Sunday he was alive – the café owner tried to insist on giving Isaac a free ice cream as we walked past. I turned it down, we were on our way home for dinner. I wish I had let him have the ice cream.

My scrolling stops short just before our apartment. It is the first time I have laid eyes on these streets since the day of the Beirut Blast, and I can’t bring myself to view the entrance to the building. The entrance that I ran out of, drenched in blood, holding Isaac and shrieking for help. Where another women screamed at the sight of me and turned away. Where I saw a bloodied man lying on the ground. Was he dead or alive? I don’t know. Where another man tried to help me, telling me Isaac’s injury wasn’t too bad, and I should just run to the hospital on foot.

I can’t bring myself to look.

Instead, I put my phone down and check my youngest son Levi as he naps. I watch his rhythmic breathing and smile at the sound of his faint snore, a cute little snort he emits when he has a blocked nose.

Today, he is two years and three months old. The exact same age that Isaac was when he died.

The lead-up to this time has been filled with anxiety. For weeks, I have woken up with a sense of dread in my stomach. I have felt overwhelmed, stressed. The stress reached fever-pitch this morning. Will we make it? Will we reach 6:08pm? The time everything changed on the day Isaac died.

Throughout the day, I cling to Levi. I berate myself for telling him off when he tried to climb out of his cot. What if he falls asleep and never wakes up? What if that was my last interaction with him? I hover while he sleeps, watching him like a hawk.

After he wakes up, the afternoon passes by, filled with the chaos of having two young boys. A playground visit, laundry to be sorted, dinner to be cooked. But as the clock approaches 6pm, I become acutely aware of the time again, watching the minutes tick by. Levi is in his highchair for dinner, just as Isaac was that night. I crouch beside him, one arm around him. He reciprocates, putting a pudgy arm around my neck and resting his head on my shoulder as he eats.

I swear I can feel the floor tremble, the windows shake. We are more than 13,000 kilometres away from Beirut, but images of destruction – destruction I witnessed myself and the images that have filled my social media these past days and months – swirl around in my mind. I position myself so that I am between Levi and the window. Something I didn’t do the night Isaac died. My fatal mistake.

I know it is illogical, the idea that something would happen to Levi when he is the exact same age as Isaac and at the exact same time of day. But grief and trauma are illogical.

6:08 comes and goes. I feel a wave of relief. I now know that I will have one more minute with Levi. Maybe one more day, one more week or one more year. Hopefully a lifetime. But no matter how much time, it will be more than two years and three months.

After the relief though, comes a wave of sadness. Isaac, our first born, is now forever my youngest child.

We have been through this before. When my second son, Ethan, approached this age, I felt the same pit of anxiety and dread for weeks, followed by a sense of relief as we passed 6:08. But it was also different with Ethan. When he crossed the threshold from being younger than Isaac to older than him, my grief was around the fact that from here on in, everything would be new.

By that stage, we had been parents for four years and eight months, but we only knew what it was like to parent a child who was just over two years old. When Ethan was two years and three months, we should have already gone through toilet training, moving from a cot to a big bed, starting kinder and planning for primary school with Isaac. Instead, we were facing these challenges for the first time. As parents, we had stunted development and every new milestone that Ethan hit was – and still is – a reminder that Isaac never made it this far.

But Levi now follows a path already tread by Ethan. Of course, it won’t be the same, because they are not the same, but as parents we will have a better idea of what to expect.

Instead, as Levi hit two years and three months, it is not about looking out into the unknown, but bringing into sharp focus of what has been missed. Suddenly, I am acutely aware of how small Levi is, how much more developed Ethan, how much we have gotten to know Ethan over these past 2 years. How much better I know his likes and dislikes, his fears and anxieties, his cheeky sense of humour, where he excels and where he needs more support. How many more cuddles I have received, how many more times I have heard him say “I love you Mummy”. How many fascinating conversations we have had, as he asks me brilliant questions like “how to whales sleep” or “what do tiger snakes eat” or “how does the body move what it needs from food around the body.”

Levi is advanced for his age – as all my boys have been – but he is just not there yet, because he is only two years and three months. And suddenly it hits me. Isaac was my everything, and I thought I knew everything about him. But really, I knew nothing at all. I was never given the chance.

Grief is not a linear process. Time does not heal all. Just as you think you have learnt to cope, there is a new curveball. New milestones, new things that the kids say or do, new triggers of the death and destruction witnessed, are all reminders that the grieving process never really ends.

Two years and three months is over in the blink of an eye. But it is enough to make an impression for a lifetime.