This year has been filled with sorrow, joy, health, illness, triumph, failure. It has been a year of growth, of moving homestead & continuing to mourn. It has been a terrific year and a difficult year. And it has been a year that I have thought about you, Shiya and Ayrie each & every day. Sometimes with sadness, sometimes with laughter, sometimes because a picture of your family that is new to me comes across my “news feed”. The twins still say goodnight to him each time they regard the night sky. My youngest still has conversations with him “in my heart”, she says. Know we are thinking of you as you prepare to remember him on his sixth birthday & I get carrots ready to shred for our cake in his memory. Hugs & love & this reminder:
Published a year ago today:
SO many posts are running through my head but the one I need to write TODAY is this one- because tomorrow I can’t say all that needs to be said today.
Today is Tuesday. Today is just another day. Today is the day before the 5th birthday of a child of a wonderful friend of mine. Today should be a day for last minute preparations, baking, decorating, stuffing gift bags… but it’s not. Because my friend’s child had a complex medical condition and he died last fall. He is dead. People can say the ugly words religions use to describe this, but saying “angel”, “heaven”, “whole again”, “in the light”, NONE of these things fill the emptiness in my friend’s arms, the ache in her heart, the agony she is experiencing as tomorrow approaches. Tomorrow she faces another “first” in the list of events after the death of a child- his first birthday on which he will not age, he will not enjoy candles and cake with she and his younger brother, he will not… anything. He no longer exists in the physical realm we experience on Earth. It SUCKS. And I am angry at the Universe that so many of my friends have to, or will, experience this pain.
I want to remind her that tomorrow is no different- it is not special in its difference from each and every day- every painful day without her son. It is holding her now in a state of terror, fear that tomorrow will bring the collapse she has spent all these months fighting. That does not make tomorrow more special than any day this week, or last week, or last month, or Christmas or any other day. Tomorrow will come, and the searing pain and agony of his loss will be great, but not as great as that first day, that first moment of knowing and not being able to bring him back. I want her to know that she survived the worst on that day, that she has the strength to face and get through tomorrow because she has already survived the worst. She has already committed to continuing, to thriving, to supporting her other son to thrive, as the son who has died would want. She is so strong- although she is feeling as if a drop of water, a shift in the breeze, might be all it takes to break her. She is strong and she doesn’t need to be- because we are here to help hold her when the journey knocks her down.
I want her to know, and to feel, that she is loved and supported and right and just on her trail through the perils of the loss of a child. What I want to do is go to her; to bring cake, to bring candles, to bring wine, and to sit and hold hands and hug and cry and laugh and remember the beacon her child shared with the world for his short 4.5 years. I want to celebrate the gift that was her child. I want her agony to soothe, her memories of joy to once again be strong. I want some of the moments she experiences to be filled with peace.
Please know we love you and will be celebrating the life of our special friend tomorrow.
Basekamp Laundry Mountain 