the beginning of after

i am heading home for california tomorrow. i will be happy to get there and see my husband, who left for home on tuesday, and i'll be happy to see the furries again but it is bumming me out. it is making me so depressed and sad. it's the first step on the road to life going on without devin and it hurts.

all of my family were here except my sister-in-law, marie, who had to stay home in holland with her and patrick's little boy. otherwise we were all here... from pittsburgh, from san jose, from amsterdam. it was great and horrible to see everyone. seeing devin in the casket... i don't even have words to describe just how terrible that was. seeing and meeting his friends and all the people who loved him gather for two days and then pack the funeral to standing room only... i don't have words to describe how incredible that was.

if a funeral can be neat, devin's was. we couldn't do what his dad, my brother mick, and his brother, my nephew colin, said he'd really like - a viking funeral pyre - but we did our best. we had ziggy stardust and justin sane, friends singing aeroplane over the sea by neutral milk hotel and playing irish traditional music. we had grandpap singing danny boy, love and farewell messages written on an irish flag, memories shared and even devin's own words that showed his zest for life. we gave him as good a send off as we could and i believe we did him proud.

he died in a fall, in an accident. it wasn't hit and run, a drunk driver, nothing like that. a fall, an accident, a piece of horrible, terrible, dreadful luck, and that helps. it gives me comfort, truly. he wasn't left for dead. he wasn't left like a piece of trash. people did try to help him and even though it didn't make enough of a difference to save him they tried, and that's what matters. devin was an organ donor. right at this very moment someone has his heart. someone has his lung. someone has his kidney, and someone has his liver, someone has his corneas (i think, anyway), and that does NOT help. that he's helping others to live doesn't give me the slightest bit of comfort and i always thought that knowing your loved one helped others to live would be some sort of consolation, but i was wrong. i know it's right, but it doesn't help because it doesn't bring devin back and it doesn't give his death purpose or meaning. someone else gets to live for a while because devin and the rest of us were robbed and brutalized. it's not that i begrudge them and their loved ones, because i don't. it's just they aren't my loved ones. they aren't devin and they never will be and that is a very bitter pill, indeed.

i love you devin patrick geever. always have, always will, and i will always miss you.

devin

in the generation after mine the geevers run to boys... of the eight grandkids, six are boys. devin was the third of my nieces and nephews and he died today. he turned 19 on january 17th, while he was in the icu of tallahassee memorial hospital. on the evening of the 15th of january he was, from all indications, the victim of a hit and run accident on the main campus of florida state university, where he was a freshman. someone hit him so hard they broke his hips, fractured his pelvis, broke and fractured his ribs, bruised his kidney and pancreas, mangled his spleen so badly it had to be removed, collapsed both his lungs and by the time he was found, caused almost all the blood in his body to hemorrhage out of him. at first we thought his head, at least, wasn't injured but we were wrong. two days after his birthday, after a CAT scan and and EEG determined his brain was no longer functioning, he was removed from life support. he was surrounded by his family and friends and i will regret until the day i die that i wasn't able to be there.

whenever a loved one dies everyone says how great they were, how special they were, and devin really, really was so incredibly, amazingly, wonderfully special. on both his personal and memorial facebook pages almost every single person mentions his sunny disposition and his wicked sense of humor. just like his brother, colin, he could have you laughing so hard it hurt, so hard you thought you'd never catch your breath. he was incredibly smart and could have done anything, really. he wanted to be an engineer. he was a sweet, loving, darling boy who i didn't get to spend enough time with. i let geography and money dictate how much time i spent with him and his brother and sister and my brother and sister-in-law. like everyone else i thought there'd be more time. i thought there was all the time in the world, but i was wrong.

so what do i remember most about devin? his smile. his laugh. how blue his eyes were. how tall he got! how funny he was. how he was the fattest baby and the skinniest young man. how much i loved that his birthday was two days from mine... i'm not sure i ever told him that but i did. i was so happy he was a capricorn, too. how he looked like the spitting image of his mom and his dad at the same time. his easy going, fun loving personality. how he and his brother, when they were little , used to bicker but how they always forgot about it and were soon thick as thieves again. watching him tease his sister, play with his dog, his delight at having the birds at butterfly world land on him. how much fun you had when you and your cousins were together... that was a delight to witness. i could go on and on and never run out of things to say. the hole his death has left in my heart, in my family, is impossible to describe. one of his friends wrote to him on his facebook page that a lot of her memories of him made her laugh but they all made her cry, and that is exactly how i feel. i simply cannot imagine the world without devin in it. it doesn't make sense to me... it never will.

i love you, devin, and i always will. i am sorry i didn't get to spend more time with you, and i'm glad that you seemed to like hanging out with me when we were together. you were such a blessing, such a delight, such a precious gift. my life is richer for you having been a part of it and poorer for your absence. there are not enough words in all the languages of the world that can express how much we all love you. how much we wish we had more time with you. i would trade places with you in a heartbeat if i could but i can't, and i hate it! so i'll just keep loving you, keep holding you in my heart, and hope that some day i'll get to be with you again.