(That’s actually a lie. I’m not much of a poet so I’ll spare us all by not trying.)

I just want to say this: Mark had some spectacular eyebrows. I noticed them right away. He was a big baby when he was born — about 8 1/2 lbs (his sister was bigger. I chalk their size up to my pregnancy cravings, which I can describe this way: Meat Lovers Pizza). Mark also had a head of very dark hair, with the cutest long sideburns (earning him, briefly, the nickname “Tiny Elvis”). All that dark hair eventually faded away/fell out, replaced by a lighter brown, but the dark eyebrows stuck around. I drew this picture in my journal when he was a few months old. He would arch them, without realizing it, and I thought it was adorable.

As I’ve mentioned before, Mark was late to bloom. He looked 6 until he was 9; he looked 9 until he was 11; he looked 12 until he was about 16. And then he finally started to grow. At 19, his legs were just furring up, his body changing and morphing into man-shape. He’d gone from Tenor to Baritone. There was a cleft in his chin, just starting to deepen; his Uncle Bill had sent him off to his sophomore year at VT with a new electric trimming set, which delighted him.

And those eyebrows just got darker and fuller.

Had he made it to middle age, they would have been a thicket, a wiry tangle.

I really really wish I’d gotten a chance to see how he turned out…as a man, as a husband, a father, a grandfather. I’d laugh with his wife about those eyebrows. I’d show her his baby pictures. We’d make “secret” plans – loudly, to make him protest – to trim them while he slept.

I hope heaven includes the opportunity to do all this stuff…maybe a room or a holo-deck where you can go and live the life, at least for a little while, that got taken away. Or maybe none of this will matter, in heaven. Just seeing him will be enough.