It seems like every year on the anniversary of Keeghan’s death, I talk about my own grief. I talk about how losing a child affects our family. This year - the 15th anniversary of his death - I want to talk about Keeghan. I want those of you who will take the time to read this to know my son better. Rest assured, dear reader, that you missed out on knowing an amazing young man .
As a baby, he was perfectly content to just watch his big sister. She turned 2 just four days after he was born, so she was still a toddler. As he reached the age to be old enough to sit on his own, he would watch her running around like a crazy child (which she was) and just smile. Anything she wanted to do, anywhere she went, he followed. First with his eyes only. Then as he was able to crawl and walk, he followed. Whatever she wanted to do to him, he allowed. That’s how we ended up with pictures of them both covered in ballpoint ink. She was nice enough to draw on her own face so that they at least matched! It’s also how they ended up covering a room in baby powder at their grandparents house once! They were beautiful trouble together.
The first way Keeghan ever pronounced “I love you” was “I sush oo” (sush sounds like “lush” and the oo sounds like the oo in tattoo). To this day, Mackenzie still says it that way to me and I love it.
Keeghan was never a morning person. As a baby, I could change his diaper and get him completely dressed for daycare and he would not wake up. I started talking him through the whole process of getting dressed as a way to engage him and get him to wake up. I’d say, “Left sock, right sock, pants, shirt - tag goes in the back…” as I got him dressed. Eventually it became our fun Mama-and-Keeghan morning routine and he’d say the words. I think he was probably in school before he stopped saying “tag goes in the back” when he put his shirt on!
He was 3-years-old and in daycare in November 2000 when George W. Bush was running against Al Gore for President. The day before the election was school picture day. As he hopped up into the chair, the photographer asked him who he was voting for. Without skipping a beat Keeghan replied, “Al Gore!” He had obviously been listening to us talk at home and formed his own idea of who to vote for! The photographer - an older gentleman as I recall (although he probably was younger than I am now, so how funny is it that I remember him as being “older”?) - laughed out loud, which then made Keeghan giggle. That was the moment the picture was taken. To this day, it is one of my absolute favorite pictures of Keeghan!
Just a couple of months after the election, we took a trip to visit Mike’s parents in Texas to ring in the year 2000 with the whole family. Mike had told me many times about how when he was a kid, if he asked his dad about anything, his dad would tell him to go look it up. On this particular visit to Texas, Keeghan somehow got into a conversation with his grandad about whether or not tomatoes are a fruit or a vegetable. Grandad insisted they are a vegetable. Keeghan - who even at that age took great pride in how many facts he knew - looked at his grandfather and said, “It has seeds, so it is a fruit. Look it up.” He then turned his back and walked away - it was the pre-schooler equivalent of a mic drop! The best part though was the look on both Mike’s and his father’s face. Mike told me later that he thought for sure his dad was going to kill his son!
Keeghan always had this innate coolness about him. I have no idea where he got that! I volunteered at the kids’ school often and I was always amazed at the older kids who would pass Keeghan in the hall and high-five him and say, “Whassup, Keeghan!” And my little 5-year-old would high five them back, acting all cool like these were his homies! It wasn’t just other boys though. At the end of his first day of 1st grade, I was standing with him outside the school waiting for Mackenzie to get out of class. Keeghan was sitting on his bike (I let him ride it to school, but I was still walking behind him). A little girl who had been in his kindergarten class the previous year, but wasn’t in his class for 1st grade ran up to him and said, “Keeghan, I MISS you!” She threw her arms around him and hugged him. He kept one hand on his handlebars and put the other around her, patting her on the back like such a stud! I know my mouth had to be hanging open in shock. Who was this kid???
At the same time that he was so cool, he also had no shame when it came to showing love for his family. There was a boy in his kindergarten class who was a serious problem child. This little boy would scream at his mother if she walked too close to him on the walk to or from school. He didn’t want to be seen with her. Keeghan, on the other hand, would proudly hold my hand. When that boy criticized him for holding his mom’s hand, Keeghan replied, “I love my mom. You should love yours, too.”
Keeghan was so smart, but sometimes that was a bit…limiting. He was a very concrete thinker. He took everything at face value as a little boy. Case in point - I was going to college full-time in the evenings from the time Keeghan was almost 2 until he was 5. We were stationed in North Dakota at the time. Mike would come home from work and I would immediately leave to go to evening classes until 10:00pm. One night, Mike was playing a video game and the kids were playing. He didn’t realize how much mess they were making in the house, but when he eventually did, he said, “You guys, we have to get this cleaned up before Mama gets home or she’s going to kill us!” Instead of immediately starting to pick up their mess, both kids fell apart in hysterical tears. “Why would Mama KILL us?” Mike managed to calm them down and get the house picked up before I got home, but the way he told me the story almost had me in tears laughing! You had to be very careful in how you said things to Keeghan at that age!
That concreteness lasted his whole life in many ways, but in later years it was evidenced more in his sarcasm. We moved from North Carolina to Texas in 2004, just before Keeghan started 3rd grade and Mackenzie started 5th grade. On the bus on the way home from the first day of school, a bully on the bus told Keeghan he was going to throw him out the window. Keeghan looked at the window and then back at the kid and said, “I won’t fit.” Thank God for a savior in the form of a big sister at that point! Mackenzie dropped her backpack and got in the bully’s face and told him he’d have to go through her first. This was the day she gained the nickname “Maxx” because the bus thug asked her what her name was. She told him it was Mackenzie, but the next day when she passed him at school, he said, “Yo Maxx, what’s up?” And it stuck.
Keeghan told us when he was about 3 years old what he wanted to be when he grew up.
“I want to be a maker guy, just like Daddy.”
Mike was a lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force, so we were clueless as to what a “maker guy” was.
“What does a maker guy do, Keeghan?”
“He makes dinner!”
That eventually graduated to being a “cooker guy.” It wasn’t until he was 5 that he watched a show about sharks and learned that they are resistant to cancer. That was when he decided that he was going to become a marine biologist when he grew up so that he could find a cure for cancer. That ambition stuck from that point on. In fact, when we were told in the hospital five years later that he had cancer, I think I said “No, he can’t HAVE cancer. He’s going to CURE cancer.”
Keeghan was never much of a behavior problem. In fact, I don’t remember ever having to discipline him much. He liked to please people. I guess that is why his kindergarten experience of misbehaving in class stands out in my memory. The teacher had a board in the classroom where each student had a paper frog. The frogs started every day on their lily pad. If the student had to be told to behave, they would have to move their frog. I honestly don’t recall what the progression of movement was. I only remember that eventually, if they had to move it enough times, it ended up in the pond. Keeghan was having problems one particular week with keeping his frog on its lily pad. Knowing him, it was because he was talking too much when he should be listening, because he never really got in trouble for anything else. After a few days of him moving his frog each day, we had a talk with him and told hm that if he had to move his frog the next day, he was going to lose being able to play outside after school.
The next day I was there waiting when he came out of the school. As soon as he walked out of the building, I knew. His little face crumpled in tears. He dropped his backpack and ran to me. I hit my knees and just gathered him in. I think I cried right along with him. He just kept saying, “I TRIED, Mama, I really tried!”
I know he was telling the truth, too. His heartbreak was proof of that. I had to stick to my guns though and made him stay in the house that day while his sister and other friends got to play outside. I think it hurt me just as much as it hurt him. It must have worked though, because he never had multiple days in a row of moving his frog again!
We always said that Keeghan was an old soul or that he was the wise old man of our Fantastic Four. Since his death, Mackenzie has said that Keeghan actually lived to be 85. He just did it in 12 years. One of the things he used to do that made me think he was an old soul trapped in a little boy’s body was when he would disappear on the trampoline. If dinner time rolled around and we couldn’t figure out where he was, we merely had to go out to the backyard and look at the trampoline. Many times we found him out there by himself, lying on his back staring up at the sky. I have no idea what went through his mind during those zen trampoline breaks. I sure wish I did though.
Another example of Keeghan’s funny brain at work happened one afternoon when he was probably about 7- or 8-years-old. Mike was in the kitchen cooking and I was just around the corner in the living room playing a video game that the kids often played. Keeghan ran through the room, stopped to look at where I was at in the game, and said, “Yeah, I’ve played that part, too.” I sarcastically responded with some comment about how he’d done everything before. His response was, “I’ve never had diphtheria.”
Mike walked into the living room and asked, “Did he just say he’s never had diphtheria?” I think I was still just staring at Keeghan, speechless. We asked him how he even knew that word. He then told us all about the movie Balto and how the girl in the movie had diphtheria. Perfectly logical explanation, but it still cracked us up that he remembered (and could say) diphtheria!
Going back to that story about moving his frog…I’m sure that I cried with him when he came out of the school and sobbed because I always cried when he cried. In fact, I’ve always had a hard time seeing either of my children cry without crying along with them. When Keeghan was getting chemotherapy at Walter Reed, we had a routine that we went through while he was getting his port accessed because even though they put cream on the port site to numb it before sticking him with the (huge) needle, it was still very scary. So I would lean over him, almost nose-to-nose, and tell him to blow my hair. He would focus on blowing my hair out of my face so that he wasn’t paying attention to the needle coming at him. One day it was all just too much though. He was trying to blow my hair, but he couldn’t stop the tears from streaming. Seeing that destroyed me, so of course I ended up crying right along with him. The nurse who had the needle asked me why I was crying. Before I could reply, Keeghan very matter-of-factly said, “It’s ok. When I cry, she cries. It’s what we do.” Laughing and crying at the same time happened a lot when he was in treatment.
On one of our many trips across Washington, DC, to get from the base we lived on to Walter Reed for a chemo appointment, Keeghan killed us with his sarcastic wit. There was an intersection in the District that we always got stopped at and there was always someone on the median selling something - bottled water, flowers, fruit. Always. On one particular day, however, the median was empty. I commented that it was the first time we’d ever been stopped there and not seen someone selling something. From the back seat, Keeghan very drily replied, “Wow, Mama…I’m so glad we were able to be here to share this experience with you.” I looked at Mackenzie, who was sitting beside me in the front seat, and her mouth was hanging open like, “Oh no, he didn’t just say that!” Then we both started laughing. As soon as we started laughing, Keeghan started giggling. I think we laughed the rest of the way home!
In the last days of Keeghan’s life, when he was no longer able to walk on his own and spent a lot of time either laying in his bed or on the sofa, he said something to me that, to this day, haunts me. He was in his bed and I was leaning over him, talking to him. At one point I ran my hand through his hair and I said, “You’re a good man, Charlie Brown.” This was something I’d said to him since he was little. But this time he shook his head, as if to disagree. I asked why he didn’t think he was a good man. He was slow to form words by this stage, but when he could get them out he said, “Because I have cancer.” I vehemently told him that cancer was not who he was and that he damn well WAS a good man! But it has tortured my mind for 15 years now that he may have died thinking he wasn’t good because he had cancer. Children should never have to feel like they have somehow failed because they are sick.
There are so many stories I could tell. I could tell you how the only request he had of his neurosurgeon before his first surgery was that he not make him stupid or that he asked if he could have the tumor to keep in a jar after surgery. I could tell you about how he always thought about others before himself, even has he himself was dying. I could tell you that he had the best laugh, gave the best hugs, danced in his chair when food tasted good or that he loved coffee with his breakfast (with one half-and-half creamer and one Irish creamer). Honestly, I could go on forever. Keeghan was amazing. He wanted so many things out of life and did not get most of them. The one thing he got plenty of though was love. He was so loved in life and he is still so loved now.
So, there you have it…for now. My boy in (more than) a few words.
