good

This morning I’m running like a well oiled machine, breakfast, big boy dropped off at school (with his lunch, jacket, and homework), grocery store run with no meltdowns, and the rainbow baby is peacefully napping in his crib. I’m not exaggerating when I say this is the first time since Damon died that I’ve felt like I’m on top of things.

The weather has finally turned which means this thermophile is driving with the windows down and the radio up. After a loooong month of waiting we assembled the eldest’s new basketball goal and a gaggle of little boys ping ponged between the trampoline and the driveway all day yesterday. I’m riding high on feeling good for more than a few hours in a row. It’s a new good. It’s not the care-free all is right with the world good of those whose hearts are intact. It’s a good weaved through with pain and missing, those ever-present truths, but it’s good.

And the best of the good, better than the good weather, better than a peacefully sleeping baby, better than a day of simply silliness? We go the rainbow baby’s immunocompetency blood work back. His immune system is perfect. We found out last week. It’s only just now sinking it. His immune system is perfect, PERFECT. I wish I could describe the feeling in my chest. Imagine the most relieved and excited you’ve ever been, maybe it’s a little like that.

It’s a huge relief, knowing that his body can defend itself but still find myself counting the months. It’s entirely irrational but I feel like I’m waiting for the day he reaches 20 months to believe he’s going to be ok. Last night as we played in the bath I thought “You’re nine months old. Do I only have ten months left?” I resist planning things for him. I wont buy clothes for when he’s older, bigger. He’s three months from his first birthday but I refuse to plan anything. Plans are scary, life is scary, the future is scary. What if he doesn’t make it?

But for now the littlest beckons and I plan to learn to accept this new good in my life.

Until next time…

Today is a crying day

It’s a crying day. It’s been a long time since I cried.

My man is home today so the plan was for me to catch a yoga class then spend the interviewing time cranking out as much reading as possible before I picked up my eldest. I’m back in school and life has kicked into double high gear. There’s no time, ever, for anything… including grief.

It’s weird to think about the fact that you have to make time to grieve. It takes time and energy, lots of it. If you don’t make time it will creep up behind you with its sticky black hands and you end up sobbing in a coffee shop parking lot where you’re supposed to be studying. It will not be denied. Either you grieve on your terms you you grieve on its terms but grieve you will, always.

When the pain stuck in my throat I text a friend, a friend who cries out the name of her child every day, a friend who knows. I reached for her like a life-line. “Are we seriously supposed to do this for years and years!?” she responded. I can count on her to just say this is bull-***t, not to try and encourage me, not to try to put a band-aid over the gaping Damon-shaped hole.

People are so deep in denial about pain, about death, about suffering that truth makes them unaccountably uncomfortable. She mentions a conversation she had about cancer statistics “The death rate is 100%. I will die, you will die, my daughter died.” The woman looked at her as if she had seen a ghost.

I’ve said it before but life after Damon’s death is like waking up from the Matrix… knowing how black the world really is and not being able to convince anyone that what they are seeing isn’t real, standing outside of everything, alone, excluded. Caught between a desperate desire to die and the desire to cling to life.

Today is a crying day. I miss him so much I can’t breathe. Walking through life is so weird. I put one foot in front of the other, just like everyone else. I love my children and my husband, just like everyone else. I study. I work. I even laugh but I’m not just like everyone else.

Today is a crying day. Damon Ray, you forever have my heart. I never forget. I’m never ever not missing you. I’m never ever not thinking of you. My precious baby boy. Today is a crying day…

Until next time…

Raw

The thing about grief…about profound soul darkening, life destroying grief is that is scrubs you raw. It exposes your heart. You walk around with no skin on. Every breath of air, every friendship lost, every story of pain, every death reaches to the core. There is no distance, everything burns.

This world is a horrible place. Every single day there are stories, death, torture, pain, anguish, loss. It’s horrible. Before Damon died I was in such denial. I refused to see it and if I was forced to see it I refused to feel it. I can’t do that anymore. I’m held under the black water, absorbing the anguish I know the mother of a dead child in Afghanistan is feeling, the confusion of the fathers holding vigil in the cancer unit, the loneliness of the widow whose family just has no time.

I view the happy denial of most of the world with disdain… fully acknowledging just two years ago I was fully there. I get that it’s crippling to feel it all, to see it all, but I’m so tired of hearing how good life is, how good god is when all you have to do is turn on the news for five minutes to see clear evidence to the contrary.

I’m tired of the chosen few who have had the privilege of growing up protected and loved, who have had the means to have what they need, whose children are growing healthy and happy making the rules as if having survived a crap storm is some how inconvenient to their pleasant illusion. The thing is most of the world is living with some sort of gaping wound. Outside of North America most people are barely surviving. Mothers are watching their children starve. People are lonely. Hell, I know I am. The people who most need relationship are shoved to the periphery because their pain is inconvenient. Quite frankly, this is crap.

Until next time…

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....

Sweet tea and Hard work

Most mornings after I drop Isaiah off at school I swing by McDonalds and get a gigantic sweet tea, because I’ve given up Dr. Pepper…again. Don’t smirk, it might stick this time.  Hush.

Anyway, four or five days a week I see roughly the same people and by in large they are exceedingly pleasant. I have so much respect for these incredibly hard working individuals who manage to smile as they serve everyone else all day, every day. I don’t think I would be quite so easy to get along with.

Am I the only one who somehow got the impression at some point that these type of jobs were somehow dishonorable, that the very people on whose shoulders our country is built are somehow less? I’m not exactly sure when I realized that this was a subconscious belief but when I did I was pretty disgusted with myself.

It seems like there’s an attitude that anyone who isn’t wealthy, or god forbid, needs help is somehow a drain on society. Well, we’ve needed help. We need help. Often it’s really hard to admit. It’s hard to know that we can’t just make it work like everyone else seems to be able to.

I’m frustrated by this. I’m frustrated that it seems that worth in our culture is so centered on money and the perception of perfection. We gasp in shock as life after life crumbles to the ground after years of plastered smiles, perfect houses, and perfectly styled name brand clothes. When are we going to get it? When am I going to get it?

I’d really like it if we would all get real but in the mean time I’m just going to work on me. I’m going to work on identifying my underlying beliefs, reinforcing the ones that are beautiful, and rejecting the ones that are ugly.

People have worth. The sweet lady who grinned like I had made her day when I complemented her fuzzy hat as she handed me my change has worth, big time worth. So do I, so do you, period.

Until next time.