Confusion

I’m so confused right now that it’s hard to piece together a complete sentence. I’ve been staring at this screen far longer that I’d like to admit. My attention span is about an hour. Anything more than that, and I get completely overwhelmed. All I know is that the world has become a painful, black nothingness.

There’s a great deal of anger, too. In part, I want to ask the world how dare it go on now that my children are dead. Well meaning friends keep urging me to move on, and others are trying to placate me by telling me about the loss of their grandmother or something like that. I understand that all loss is painful, but unless the person talking has lost a child, they do not, in any sense of the word, have the right to tell me about loss. A friend who is always telling me she’ll be there for me texted a couple of days ago to apologize for not being there for me. It’s a pattern with her. That, too, made me so angry. I don’t have time for the trivial problems of others. My children are dead. What on earth could be more important than that? I want to scream at the people who think my life should be moving forward right at this moment. Moving forward means stepping out of my world and into the world where my children no longer exist. They are still the very center of my world. Why would I want to leave it? My mind is a giant blur of anger and sadness. I’m thankful for even the slightest bit of shock and numbness to take off the edge. I want to sleep for hours, but I can barely sleep for minutes. I just want everything to stop for a while. Give me more than two weeks to work through this, or whatever the “moving on” phrase is for this loss. I know I need to re-find my place in the world, but right now, I just don’t want to.

Please Don’t…

…tell me that you understand grief unless you’ve looked at your child’s lifeless body and felt your own heart taken into a grave.  I’m sorry if you lost your parent, grandparent, random cousin, etc, but it is *not* the same.  I’m sorry, too, that you have felt pain.  And I am so happy that your perception of pain is much lower than mine.  To me, pain is life.  My child is gone, and I carry that loss with me every second of every day.  I won’t “moved past it” or “get over it.”  I will *attempt* to live with it.  Sometimes living merely means existing.  I will attempt to live well, but you must understand that my world is confusing.  In my world, “normal” has been replaced by a very strange reality that I just can’t come to grips with.

Please don’t make platitudes.  They are worthless.  I have no idea whether my son has gone to “a better place,” and frankly I find no comfort in that remark.  His place is here, with me.  Wherever he is, it’s not the best place for him.  And he hasn’t passed on.  He has died.  Please stop telling me otherwise.  It only makes me cling tighter to hope that I know isn’t there in the first place.

Don’t forget my son.  He lived, even though he is gone now.  Please, please don’t be afraid to say his name.  I love talking about him.  Even if it makes me cry, it still brightens my day.  Andy lives in me, and I want to share him any way I can.  Don’t be afraid to talk to me on Mother’s Day or on Andy’s birth and death days.  They are hideous, painful days, but they are real.  Pretending that they are not real merely makes me feel isolated.  A child’s death shatters everything.  I know that you might feel uncomfortable with me on those days, but please don’t treat me like a glass doll.  I am much stronger than you think.  Afterall, I am surviving my son’s death every day.

Please don’t take offense if I stare into space sometimes.  You are not boring me, and I am not about to do something rash.  I’m probably just thinking of my son, of his life and his death.  The smallest thing can set off that train of thought.  You must understand that I see him in everything.  In the spring, I think about his splashing through puddles in his little yellow rain boots.  Every night I think about watching him sleep.  Every morning, I think about waking up to his smile.  When I stare into space, I’m merely situating myself in my memories.  Andy still lives in that world.

Don’t take away my memories by banishing me or my son into some mythological netherworld.  I spend a great deal of time trying to make others comfortable with my loss.  They are well-intentioned, but when they bring up my son’s death, they find themselves unable to withstand the intensity of the situation.  After a child has died, there are no rules.  Please don’t feel that you *have* to bring up my son’s death, but don’t think that you have to avoid the topic in order to keep me from turning into a complete and utter mess.  I’ve become very good at postponing that until the time is right.

Don’t be afraid of me or of my son’s memory.  His death is not contagious.  It eats away at my life and soul every day, but it will not take away your loved ones or create a permanent hole in your world.  There are no words to express my gratitude to the people who *can* sit with me, even in the depths of my grief, and know that they will remain whole after our conversations have ended.

Above all, please don’t forget that I am a mother.  That identity will always be a part of me, because my child will always be a part of me.  I can’t touch him or hear his voice, but I carry his life and his death with me everywhere I go.  Andy will always be my son, and I will always be his mother.  Please understand that death cannot take away that role.  A mother’s love for her child is too deep.  The greatest comfort you can give to me is to remember my child and recognize that I am a mother still.

Missing

Andy would be 12 on Saturday.  Almost a teenager.  There are so many things I wonder about the person he would be.  I want to hold him, even though at 12 he’d probably squirm a bit more than he did as a young child.  I wonder what sort of music he’d like, what sort of books he would read, what he would do for fun.  In essence, I wonder who he would be.  And that’s what hurts most– I have to wonder who my own son would be.  I don’t have the luxury of simply watching him grow.  Instead, I picture him growing up in my mind.

I was awake most of the night last night thinking about this person I’ll never meet.  When I finally did fall asleep, I dreamt of coffins and churches and rainy graves.  I dreamt of car accidents, screaming children, and tiny bodies damaged beyond repair.  The most frightening thing about my nightmares is that they continue in my waking hours.  This is life now– wondering how Andy is and who he would be today.  I wonder, too, about how and where he and his father are now.  I wonder if they can see and hear those of us who miss them so much.  Sometimes I *feel* Andy against my chest.  I wrap my arms around air and hold it close to me, imagining a beautiful little boy, my son, laughing as I hugged him.  The Great Mother.  The Protector.  Those archetypes can be found in all societies throughout history.  Losing that role physically hurts.  Once I finally got out of bed this morning, I doubled over after just a few minutes.  The pain in my stomach was almost unbearable, and I felt like someone was stomping on my chest.  Phantom pain.  What’s missing hurts me physically.  Amputation is an ugly word, but that’s what it is, really.  My child was amputated from my life, and my body aches from that loss.

Mentally, this week will be hell.  Andy’s birthday seems cruel now.  I want to celebrate his life, but it seems cruel to celebrate a birthday that he won’t have.  I don’t feel like celebrating anyway.  I feel like stomping my feet.  I’m angry that I have to walk around with this hole in me all the time and angry that my son’s life was stolen from him.  I’m just angry with everything at the moment.  More than any other day of my grief year, it’s Andy’s birthday that confuses me.  How do you mark the birth of your child who has died?  It’s just cruel.

Nearing *That* Day

Sunday marks the third anniversary of Alan’s and Andy’s deaths.  I’m not sure how to handle it.  After three years, it stills confuses me.  First comes the fear.  I anticipate that day with such great fear that it literally leaves me shaking sometimes.  This year, the fear has been followed by sadness.  It’s a deep sadness that almost feels numb.  That’s something I think is unique to the loss of a child– feeling very deeply but being numb all the same.  It’s self-protection.  We can’t handle all of that emotion at one time.

I’m not sure what I expect of that day.  It changed my life so harshly.  It took away what I loved most.  I’m angry with it.  Just a number on the calendar, but I feel like cutting it out.  Maybe if I cut the date off the calendar and burn it, things will be different.  Maybe coloring over it with dark black permanent ink will erase it.  I hate that day.  I want to yell at it and demand an answer.  It just sits there on the calendar staring at me, though.  Daring me to look at it and remember.  What that stupid day doesn’t understand is that I’ll never be able to forget it.  Even if I went completely blind, the day would simply burn itself into the back of my eyelids.

I hate that day.

Overwhelm

It’s what I’ve been feeling lately. I’ve had no desire to write.  I haven’t wanted to look at my thoughts closely enough to analyze them and shape them into eloquent words that mask the anger fueling them.  If I let the anger I’m feeling at the moment surface, it might not go away for quite some time.

Sometimes the ocean rises over your head and takes you down with the tide.

Foggy Days

I’m having one of those foggy days where it seems my mind is wrapped in some sort of impenetrable mist that prevents me thinking clearly.  In trying to cope with days like this, I’ve found that it’s important for me to drag myself out in to the world beyond my own, now that enough time has passed for me to have regained that ability.  It’s so much easier to stay in the cocoon of my grief, which is oddly comforting.  My grief is my one remaining tie to Andy.  Stepping outside of that on foggy days like this seems to represent stepping away from my child, and even after two years, I’m still not ready to do that.

Since Andy’s death, I’ve experienced a constant feeling of anxiety and fear, not only for events in my life, but in anticipation of events in the lives of those around me.  I’m not explaining that well.  Sometimes it’s difficult to put these conflicting feelings in to words.  I just can’t look at a child without feeling fear.  When I see small children wandering away from their families or teenagers walking carelessly about, crossing streets or in car parks, I cringe.  What if something *happens* to these children?  How will their parents cope?  The thought of others going through this pain haunts me.  I want to protect every child in the world to keep their parents from having to face this loss.  It shouldn’t happen, and I get *so* angry sometimes because I know it *does* happen.  Innocence gets shattered, foundations get broken, and children die.

I try to keep going forward with hope and live my life in a way that would make my son proud.  Today, though, I just want to bury my head in this fog surrounding me and put the world on hold for a bit.

Sometimes Therapists Hurt

I’ve heard quite a few horror stories about hurtful things members of the clergy, mental health professionals, and others in a great position to help have said to bereaved parents. We’ve all heard sayings that were meant to help, those trite clichés that people frequently use in part to make themselves feel better about a pain they can’t understand.  Honestly speaking, I still get bitter about things like that even though I know that, for the most part, everything was said with good intentions.  During our last session, my therapist pointed out that the only time I showed any sense of happiness was when I talked about my good memories of Andy.  She said it was almost like child equals happiness.

I wanted to scream at her.  Of *course* child equals happiness.  I am a *mother,* for heaven’s sakes, and that isn’t a role I’ve given up even though my child is gone.  It’s still the very center of my identity.

The therapist has never had children, so she can’t possibly understand even a fragment of what I’m going through.  Still, her tone of voice and facial expression indicated that she thought my equating Andy with happiness was an odd thing.  Child *does* equal happiness, and I’ve said before, any sort of happiness after your child has died is muted and seen through that heavy fog of grief.  We all know that, unless they have lost a child, those trying to help can never comprehend the complete and utter wreckage we face afterward.  All I ask is that people choose their words and actions carefully.