loneliness and holidays

The aftershocks of grief roll on.

The damned holiday season… I spend most of Thanksgiving locked away sobbing while my family laughed and talked a floor below. It was the darkest I’ve been in a while. I was swallowed by the black, suffocating. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t stop crying. I was crushed under the waves.

So far I’ve spent the build up to Christmas vacillating between the urge to create new traditions and the desire for everyone and everything to go to hell. I refuse to put up the tree that Damon pulled down and permanently wonkified in the process. I will not hang stockings and try to decide if I will hand four or five. I wont. I did create a messy little tree of lights on our living room wall. My first born absolutely loves it and the rainbow baby stares at the lights like it’s the coolest thing he’s ever seen so I’m satisfied. There is some satisfaction in doing it differently, because we are different.

I’m terrified of the crash. I’m afraid of what the holiday that was once my favorite is going to do to me this year. I’m still trying to think of how to bring Damon into each ‘celebration.’ I need him there. I need him remembered but I haven’t figure out how.

The pain of isolation intensifies as I walk deeper into a life of grief. The knowledge that only my few friends who grieve their own children don’t grow tired of my weeping is devastating. So many who I thought were life-long friends have drifted away. I know I must be exhausting but it is so painful to feel like a mission rather than a person.  To be abandoned by the people who knew Damon, by the people who stood by his graveside. It feels like losing a piece of him, again.

Until next time…

Once a day...

Once a day the light hits this monitor just right and it lights up his handprints. I refuse to clean it. The pain of seeing his sweet little prints is unbearable but the thought of wiping them away is abhorrent. They are all I have left of him. The little prints here, the little prints on the back door, the little prints on the oven door, all left in stasis.

Yesterday the little rainbow concieded to be entertained by his daddy and I swept into the boy's bathroom on a mission. How do little boy's bathrooms get so completely and utterly disgusting? I started grabbing the hodgpodge of medicine and shampoo bottle scattered all over the counter and dumping them into the top drawer (because, yes, that is how I clean these days). I grabbed a bottle and stopped dead, my heart threatened to clench so hard in my chest it would just stop. They were his prescriptions, there was his name, one bottle, two bottles... what the hell? I haven't touched anything, nothing. All of his things have stayed exactly where they were. His medicine cabinet hasn't even been opened... and there they sat, staring at me, telling me what I'm starting to have to see. I can't run from this forever.

Will and I have discussed Damon's room, decided that it is time to make it rainbow baby's room, then done precisely nothing about it... over and over. I stopped going in there nearly a year ago. I just couldn't... I just couldn't. I refused to close the door. I was afraid I would close it and never open it again. I felt like closing it was somehow denying his existence, something I refuse to do. I love him. I miss him. He was here. He was REAL.

For a long time I would make sure when I left our bedroom I had absolutely everything I could possibly need so that I wouldn't have to pass that horrifyingly empty room again once I had managed to do it once. I spent months avoiding the hall. One trip out of our room in the morning, one in at night, minimize the number of times I'm stabbed through the gut. It's nuts, as if I wouldn't be stabbed a million times, a million other ways...

Every single time I pass his door I touch the doorframe. It's like my way of saying "This affects me. Every single time I pass your door. I notice. I see you standing in your crib excitedly pointing at your Zebra. I see you getting zipped into your footie pajamas by your daddy. I SEE you!!!!" And I do. I see him... always.

I carefully put all of those bottles back into his medicine cabinet. I may very well keep them until the day that I die. I may have a random computer monitor smeared with baby handprints perched somewhere in my living room for always.

He's gone... how the hell can this be real?

Until next time....