On the last day of seventh grade, at the end-of-the-school-year party, I had my first kiss.
We were in Hanover, in the Nathan’s Garden gazebo. The boy I was with, Sean McManamy, was not my first boyfriend, but he was my first love, in the sense that 12-year-olds know love. Tall, blond, blue eyed, very cute, he was incredibly funny, gregarious. He had blond eyelashes that I found beautiful and sweet. We were children growing up in a safe place, within loving families, in a kind community.
Something happens when you have your first kiss, your first love. When you know love at 12, with an exceptional person like Sean, it sears into you on a cellular level, makes a connection that lingers and persists deep in the subconscious. Our language is so inadequate at times, especially to explain the emotions evoked by love. The love I knew because of Sean, such a different love than in my adult years, put him firmly in a part of my past that I cherish. There is something precious about two children liking each other, something so important when you get to experience feeling alive in front of someone else for the first time.
Sean and I dated two summers in a row. We would part at the beginning of school but find our way back to each other for the whole summer. The summer after eighth grade I missed him every day when I went to camp for two weeks. He wrote me letters from his camp, Camp Belknap (how the name of my middle school boyfriend’s summer camp is still so easily accessible in my memory — while just this morning I almost forgot to put on actual shoes and not wear my slippers out of my house — is amazing). At the end of the last letter he wrote to me, he signed it in clean but still childlike script, “I love you, Sean.” I can still see that lettering, that message. Still feel my camp friends all crowding into my bunk to see I was loved.
When we both got back from camp we had only a couple of weeks before school started. We would meet every day in those two weeks at Storrs Pond with a group of friends. Sean and I would swim far out together and then cross to the other side alone. As we walked in the pine forest, Sean would kiss me. Even today, so long away from that time, I think of him when I smell pine needles baked by a hot summer sun. That smell makes me feel something tender, the way I felt at 13, so young, not even self-conscious in my bathing suit. Sean and I never dated again after that last summer. We were friends, friends with the same people, but never had that connection again of those sweet summers. We didn’t stay in touch after high school, and I cannot really say that I knew him as an adult.
The last time I saw Sean we were seated next to each other at the wedding of one of our high school friends. He was on my left, my husband was on my right, and I was six months pregnant with our son, Jack. Sean told me about his life as a heliski guide in Alaska and I could tell he found joy in his work, a life he loved. His girlfriend who would become his wife was back home in Alaska. She too loved the life they were living. He was so funny, as I had always found him, his eyelashes were still blond, his joy still close to the surface. It was really nice to see him, see him happy and well. We were far away from the children we had been, the connection of our summer romances a million miles away and gone, but there at that happy wedding, surrounded by so very many of the friends we had grown up with, how far away were we from that time of joy of being children together?
Through the years I have thought of Sean infrequently in my waking hours, but he has featured regularly in my dreams. That first love with that sweet boy, still washes some part of my subconscious with a connection to him. In these dreams we are always adults, he is in the crowd with a group of our high school friends. But as so often in real life, he was the center, the heart, the tallest and often best part of the crowd. A man unto himself, a boy who brought always the happiness of life with him wherever he went, even into my dreams.
The last time I dreamed about Sean it was searingly vivid. He was almost ecstatic, so, so happy, joyful, smiling constantly again in a crowd with our friends, but eclipsing the crowd. He felt very close to me, shining close by. Cellular. One last raucous, joyful party with Sean at the heart and he could not have been happier. I saw him, felt him one last time. When I woke up that morning, it was to a call from my middle school best friend telling me Sean had died the previous day in a helicopter crash in Alaska while guiding. My heart breaks for his mother and his family. Having now my own silly, precious, blond and blue-eyed little boy, I cannot imagine the loss of a light like Sean’s if he was your son, your brother, your husband.
Having recently lost my second pregnancy in as many years, I have been reading the book Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm by Thich Nhat Hanh to help deal with my losses. What I love most about this book is the idea that rather than material possessions, what we truly have to give to others is our actions, our deeds, our words, whether in love and kindness or in anger and pain. The singular thing that endures and really means anything, is our treatment of others. And the karma from these actions is the only thing that we carry with us when we die. None of the physical things we have accumulated, no money, no stuff, just the lasting results of our deeds, is what we get to take with us. “All our cherished belongings and loved ones we must leave behind, but our karma, the fruit of our actions, always follows us.”
Sean gave to so many of us lucky ones. All the love and joy he gave to his mother, his family, his wife and friends are with him now. What he gave me those two summers, the years I had him deeply and daily in my heart and mind, I know he carries with him as well. I like to think that special kind of first love, that 12-year-old connection, the happy and sweet, tender and soft summers we spent together swimming to the other side, he took with him when he swam to the other side.
Twenty-six years ago, in this same lovely month of June, I had my first kiss in the garden of a beloved lost son, with a now beloved lost son. Sean and I were living in perfect parallel only for the time it takes for lips to touch before we separated back out into the sun, the laughing of our friends, the lives both beautiful and painful waiting for us to live. A small peck on the lips was long enough to create a connection to a truly amazing person that I am forever grateful for.
C.S. Hammond lives in Hartland with her family.