Denial

Any minute now I'm going to wake up.

That's what I keep thinking.

Nine months later.

How is that possible?

Pressure Cooker

I find I have no emotional reserves anymore. The least little issue sends me into an emotional tailspin of epic proportions and leaves me feeling drained and useless. Cooking dinner is an obstacle to be overcome. If dinner needs to be cooked AND I need to run to the store for air filters in the same night, I'm overwhelmed. Throw in a daughters smashed car window and I'm nearly comatose in my inability to function.

Handling every day life is all I can do, and if there are other things going on I find myself completely avoiding Josh's suicide. Shutting him out the best I can. The longer I do that though, the more insistent the thoughts become. So I stuff them down even harder. I pack my mind like a canning jar... a memory of his smile here, the way he smelled there, then cram the mental image of the fine downy hairs on the nape of his neck in between the two and screw on the lid really really tightly. Then, just like a jar of pickles, stick it in the cooker and turn up the heat. Before you know it, I'm ready to explode without provocation or explanation.

It doesn't help that during a time when I could really stand to have some serenity in my life it feels as if I'm holding out my plate and saying "Higher and deeper please...."

Currently, my brother-in-law is living with us rent free, my daughter is pregnant and moving back in a couple of months, my 23 year old son is in Portland for the Summer and I won't see him for his birthday for the first time, my job is stressful, money is tighter than it's been in 10 years, my husbands business is floundering due to the economy and we're trying to do a re-finance on the house.

That's where I am right now. I need desperately to find time to honor and acknowledge my on-going pain. I need to have a good cry and allow myself my sorrow and my memories, but there never seems to be enough time in the day because I'm currently so inept at handling the smallest of details. I feel continuously as though I need to be doing other things.

Catch 22

The pressure's building and there is an explosion eminent.

Please.

I hurt inside my soul in a way I can't touch, see or explain. I am wounded. Broken. Shattered.

Like an injured dog, I struggle not to bite the hands and hearts trying to comfort and heal me, yet my pain is so great I lash out- with no alleviation of my own pain, but rather, deeper discomfort from the pain I cause.

Inside my head the simple word "please" repeats it'self over and over. Please don't let this be real. Please don't let this hurt so much. Please let me find my way through this. Please. Please. Please. PleasePLEASE let me have my child back.

I have learned "please" is not the magic word. There is no magic word. Yet I beg the universe to make it so. please.

Stop the ride.

8 Months.
34 1/2 weeks

Less time than I carried him inside of me. Yet it's an eternity. A vast endless chasm of frustration, agony, and despair. I scream at the top of my lungs driving down the street. I wail. I lash out at those around me. I physically double over in pain when I can't hold my grief at bay any longer. I simply can not wrap my head around the fact of this existence without him. Never hearing his voice. This is too hard. Too damn hard. Overwhelmingly hard.

For today this is how I feel. Tomorrow may be different. Grief is a process, but not a predictable one. There are no set rules, no definitive path to follow. Instead it is a roller-coaster, whipping me to and fro without the least regard to where I want to go. This ride has no foreseeable end, only moments of anticipation where it noticeably slows before taking me into another plunge.

Stop the ride, I want to get off now.

As long as I'm pissing and moaning, let me just say, if I hear the statement "God never gives you more than you can handle." one more time, someone's going to get hurt.

Seriously? Do people really still find a way to believe this rhetoric? Simple reasoning tells me that statement can't possibly be true. If it were, my son would be alive and handling his depression.

I'm angry today and I'm throwing the bullshit flag.

New Beginnings

I found out two days ago my nineteen year old daughter is pregnant.

It's going to be okay, even though the circumstances are less than stellar. She isn't the first girl to have terrible taste in men, but she does have her own apartment, has a job and insurance, as well as being one of those old souls who was simply meant to have children. (She was so bossy as a child Josh used to call her Mom sub-set one). It will be hard, but she knows we love her and are here for her, that we will love our grandchild immensely no matter what.

She is older than I was when I had Josh, so I would be the last person in the world to tell her it can't be done. But damn....She could sure use her big brother about now. I even wonder if this didn't happen because of how much she misses him. In an effort to fill the abyss he has left in her heart...all our hearts.

He loved children and would have been an incredible uncle. He would have been an incredible father. Instead his son and his nephew will know him from our memories, not their own.

Some days, I could really be pissed off at him if I didn't miss him so much.

Exquisite

So often, when I post here I feel better for having written, yet still feel I've very poorly expressed myself. Many of my posts have dealt with my feelings of gratitude, not for the loss of my son, but for the joy of his life. Each time I post something along those lines it leaves me wondering if I've somehow negated the depth of my sorrow or left the impression I'm less profoundly changed by Josh's death than I really am.

I am not whole. I will never BE whole again. My sorrow doesn't diminish as time goes by, instead it becomes easier to fake happiness with practice. Yet, there are times I truly do feel deep abiding joy. Perhaps it's a different joy than I felt seven months ago, but it's joy nonetheless. Joy for the child I was given the chance to know and love. Joy for the multitude of lessons I have learned virtue of his life, and sadly, also his death.

Yesterday, while reading a new Dean Koontz book (Odd Hours) my daughter gave me for Mother's Day, I came across the following passage and it so closely fit with what I've been feeling I wanted to preserve it here in order to find it more readily when I need to remind myself of where I want to be.....

"Loss is the hardest thing. But it's also the teacher that's the most difficult to ignore."

"Grief can destroy you--or focus you. You can decide a relationship was all for nothing if it had to end in death, and you alone. Or you can realize every moment of it had more meaning than you dared to recognize at the time, so much meaning it scared you, so you just lived, just took for granted the love and laughter of each day, and didn't allow yourself to consider the sacredness of it. But when it's over and you're alone, you begin to see it wasn't just a movie or dinner together, not just watching sunsets together, not just scrubbing a floor or washing dishes together or worrying over a high electric bill. It was everything, it was the why of life, every event and precious moment of it. The answer to the mystery of existence is the love you shared sometimes so imperfectly, and when the loss wakes you to the deeper beauty of it, to the sanctity of it, you can't get off your knees for a long time, you're driven to your knees not by the weight of the loss but by gratitude for what preceded the loss. And the ache is always there, but one day not the emptiness, because to nurture the emptiness, to take solace in it, is to disrespect the gift of life."

This was speaking of a different kind of relationship and I didn't spend a lot of time with Josh scrubbing floors or worrying about the electric bill the essence is still spot on. I also can't say I took him for granted very often, yet I did. We all do. It's not something I can explain other than to say no matter how much you think you love someone, you can't ever realize how much you really love them until they are gone. You can only imagine the impact their loss would have, you can't truly experience it unless and until they aren't there.

My son is dead. All I have left are my memories and my love for him. He was exquisite, the best son anyone could ever ask for. Brilliant, beautiful, kind, compassionate, devoted and loving. I will love him to the end of my days, not his. I will not allow his death to be the only memory I hold on to. I will not allow myself to only remember how he died, instead of how he lived. I can't give him back his life, so I will spend mine living for him.

Exquisite I tell you.

His life means more than his death.

From the Corner of My Eye

It's amazing to me the way the human mind finds ways to cope with grief. Seven months after Josh's death he is still the first thing in my mind when I wake, the last thing I think of before I sleep and often he rules my dreams as well. Yet, somehow, it's almost as if he's in my peripheral vision rather than directly in my line of sight. My mind has forced itself to redirect, refocus, and somehow cope with a loss otherwise incapacitating. I suspect I would not be here if that were not the case.

Most of the time, I'm fully aware of keeping my focus on life while thoughts of Josh hover close by. I can't bring myself to look (mentally and phsically) straight at him very often or I am completely unable to function. His ashes sit on my dresser with his picture hanging over them and I pass them at least twenty times a day and yet I rarely look at them. It comforts me to know they are there if I want to look at them, but to actually stop and do so is impossible without losing my composure. So I pass by, say the frequent "Hi Josh, I love you". and move on. By no means does this mean I don't think of him constantly, it simply means I cannot always indulge myself with a cry fest and so I keep him at a distance. Like when he was little, playing, and I was trying to get something done. I would keep him in the corner of my eye. Always aware of him, but not letting him be my primary focus at the moment. Now, even though he isn't little anymore, and he isn't here for me to watch over, I keep him in the corner of my mind's eye. The thing I'm trying to get done is living. Without him. Not focusing directly on him allows me to do this, albeit poorly.

Having said that, it also never ceases to amaze me how blindsided I can be when I am caught unawares by my grief. On those occasions it is like no time has passed and his death was only yesterday. Just when I'm going along as smoothly as I possibly can, faceing my grief, with at least a grasp on what it takes to get through the day, I find a new aspect of life that will never be the same without him. Each time that happens, I nearly double over in pain. I find myself crying, without the ability to stop, regardless of where I am.

That happened to me Friday. I work with a young man whose name is also Josh and I called his name the other day. Without thinking I said it the way I always said it when I was calling my Josh. You know, that silly lilting way I suspect all mothers have for their children when they are just trying to get their attention but don't really need anything...... Josshhh-U-aaaaaaa.

It hit me like a ton of bricks. I haven't called his name in seven months. I've said it...Josh....Joshua. His name is said as often now as it ever was, but I haven't called it through the house. I haven't been able to call him with that lilt, the rise and fall of my voice, the drawing out of the letters, the way only I called him when I was eager to show him something, excited to tell him something. I haven't had the security of knowing he was in the next room, hearing his voice answering back .... Yeah,Mom?... What's up Madre'? (Madre' and Mamasita were his terms of endearment for me... no clue why. *shrug*) The tears started flowing and wouldn't stop. There was, for a while, no buffer of time since he died. My mind was unable to keep him to the side, instead he and his death was all there, in my face. No chance to prepare myself, no way to avoid... Just pure naked grief. Fortunately, it was right at the end of my shift so I was able to leave. I sobbed all the way home and then some. Sobbed, not cried.

I can't even begin to explain why one day is worse than another or what does and doesn't have the potential to make me melt down. There are chinks in my armor, but it's hard to examine it and find them while wearing it. I don't know what the triggers are going to be in order to brace myself against them. I want to be able to avoid those moments because while in the midst of them they are terrifying in thier intensity. Their ability to derail and incapacitate....to hurt... is incredible. It's feels hopeless to try and live with the pain. my guts might as well be scooped out with a rusty spoon through a wound that has barely begun to heal. The thought of it always being this way, never reaching a point of not being blindsided makes me want to quit. Just quit.

Enough of that....

I suppose the point of this rambling post is the fact it's Mother's Day. I needed to take a few minutes to look directly at Josh. To allow myself my grief, to willingly focus on him and let the pain wash over me. I needed to be with all of my children today, in one capacity or another. This is my first Mother's day without his presence, but there will never be one without his memory. There is a piece of me missing which will never be with me again. There are so many, many facets of my life which will never be the same. God, how I miss him.

Now, I will dry my tears and set my thoughts of Josh to the side. For the rest of today, I will glance at him, but only from the corner of my eye. I will remember I am still a mother and need to do whatever is neccesary in order to be a good mother to Tanner and Rebecca. They are also grieving. They need their mother. They need ME.

Whoever the hell that is.