Hiding

I’m still here. I’m just hiding from everything. Grief has affected me far more than I could afford to let happen. I’ve missed work, so finances have slipped a bit. I decided to take a break from school because my concentration is gone. Life seems a bit pointless right now. Even though I have days that I do consider good, my life is about grief right now. It is the very center of me. It tears through me when I least expect it and hides in the shadows of my brightest days. It is always there, ready to take over everything. These days, it usually does.

Thank you, to everyone, for your unfailing kindness and patience with me. You make life do-able, even when it seems it’s not worth going through.

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.

What Now?

I don’t see myself coming out of this loss. When Andy died, the early days were excruciating. I felt overwhelmed by even the smallest of activities, and when I felt any emotion at all it was raw, unrelenting pain. Four years later, I was able to look back on that journey and see that I had, in fact, lived past the early days. Now that Madeleine has died, though, I truly don’t see how recovery is possible. There’s only so much of a person’s soul that can be taken before that person has nothing left. I know it’s likely that I’ll survive physically, but mentally and emotionally, I’m not sure what, if anything, will remain. I just don’t know how to keep going from here. Losing my son was a horrendous experience. How do you live with losing a second child? Do you ever really live again at all? At the moment, I don’t think I *want* to live again. I don’t know what to do or how to remotely get the world in order. Nothing is right anymore, and I just cannot take this pain any longer. I just don’t know how to get through it.

Ashes to Ashes

This morning, I picked up my baby’s ashes. I feel like someone has ripped open my very soul. I want to scream at the universe and ask why my children were taken away. I feel so robbed, but most of all, I know with certainty how much *they* were robbed. Instead of bringing home a new cradle, I’m bringing home an urn with the remains of my beautiful daughter who never even got a chance to live. The ultimate in unfair. My heart aches for my children, and this loss is one I’m not sure I can survive. Losing my son was the worst thing that ever happened to me, and I thought it always would be. Now, both of my children are gone. I will never attempt to have another child. I can’t go through this loss a third time.

Unexpectedly Expected

I woke up in tears this morning. I don’t mean sad– I literally woke up with tears running down my face and no idea how they got there. I don’t recall dreaming anything about my son, his father, or the accident, but my heart knows they were in my mind last night. Now, I can’t shake the sadness. A dear friend told me I carry my sadness with me everywhere I go, and he is absolutely right. Days like today, it overwhelms me.

All day, I’ve wondered about this sadness. It isn’t the gentle, constant sort. It’s the piercing, new-grief sort that happens less frequently these days. It literally feels like a whole in the center of me, slowly eating its way through my soul. I’ve called this post unexpectedly expected because the realization soon hit that I am pregnant with a child who I could also lose.

My daughter is already so loved by so many people, and she will have the absolute best I can give to her. She is growing in the safe and warm environment my body gives to her at the moment, and I will do everything possible to keep her just as safe outside. Still, in the back of my mind (and sometimes the front) I know how deeply aware I am that mothers cannot protect their children completely. I know that there is nothing I could have done to stop the car from slamming into that cold concrete barrier. I know there is nothing I could have done to protect Andy from the crash or heal him after it happened. Will I be able to protect my daughter? Will horrible things like that happen to her, as well? My fear has been rising to near panic level, and I have no idea how to lessen it. There are no words, no true promise that my daughter will grow old. I have to take it on faith that she will live a long and happy life, far longer than mine, but how do you do that when your faith has been shattered irreparably?

Today, I feel inconsolably sad and terrified for my daughter. I know how cruel the world can be.

Through the Day

Another death anniversary has passed, and I still feel cut to the center. That day slices through me like a hot knife. My emotions run from absolute numbness to deep, unrelenting pain. It takes me back to the day of Andy’s death, and it knocks me to my knees. Tonight, I’m just glad the day has passed. I’m hoping to get a few hours of sleep and start tomorrow with at least a bit of peace. It’s such a horrible day. I can’t even put it into words, no matter how much I babble on here. Thanks so much to all of you who email with support and send along good wishes. We’re together in this terrible club, and we carry each other through the hardest of times.

Fear

Fear is a part of my grief that has always confused me. I can’t exactly say what I’m afraid of or how I expect to deal with that fear. It’s just there, like the sadness. Lately, the sadness and fear and every other emotion has been horrible. I spent an hour sitting on my bed staring into space yesterday. The loss of Andy absolutely consumed me– I didn’t even realize an hour had passed. It’s a dark time. I don’t feel like doing anything. I don’t have the energy to do anything. But, school and work and general life carry on all around me. I have to at least *pretend* to be a part of it.

Perhaps the fear comes from the remnants of shock. I’ve been trying to put this into words, but I just can’t quite find them. It seems impossible to survive the loss of my child. I realize I’m doing that every minute of every day, but it just seems impossible that a mother could look at this loss and keep on breathing. It’s almost like I’m surprised that my body can function with Andy gone.

I’m digging myself out of another dark time, and the fear might come from that as well. There’s a fear of the knowledge that I’ll have times like this for the rest of my life. There’s also a fear that I *won’t* have times like this, that Andy’s life and his death will stop making such an impact on me. I know that isn’t true, but it lingers in the back of my mind. Today I just feel like razors are slicing at me from all directions, inside and out, and I want nothing more than to cover my head and wait for this constant night to pass.

What’s Left?

Last night I asked my best friend if he thought I could still claim the title of mother. He said yes without any hesitation. I wish I could be that sure. After pondering that aloud for a bit, all I could come up with was another question– what’s left?

Being a mother implies having a child. Is it simple semantics? Does saying “I had a child” equate with “I was a mother”? Can one be present tense while the other is past? It’s the same argument I wrote about in the previous post and the same argument I go through time and again in my mind. I want to be able to say yes as absolutely as my best friend said it, but the past-tense bit stops me. I still feel like a mother, but my child is gone. There’s no one left to mother. That role, for me, has faded into the past. It has changed incomprehensibly, and I no longer know where it fits in my life, where I fit, or what thread of the Universe ripped apart to create this break. It’s never how it should be. There is no explanation and no answer to the question of why. There is simply nothingness. There’s nothing left at all.

And Then It Hit Me

Mother’s Day, that is. It’s hard to take this pain sometimes, and Mother’s Day is hell. I feel like I’m standing in the middle of a row of rotating blades. The bond of mother and child is special and certainly does deserve celebration. It’s just so difficult for those of us who are missing our children. The day is filled with anything else *but* peace.

For me, Mother’s Day is a time of reflection. I think back on Andy’s little life and remember the defining moments. I remember the little moments, too. I try to immerse myself in who he was, hoping a tiny bit of that will come through in me. My memories of him are double-edged on days like Mother’s Day. They bring me comfort, because they surround me with him. They bring pain and anger, too, because they remind me that my reason for celebrating Mother’s Day is gone. Like most bereaved mothers who lost their only child, I worry that my role as mother ended when my son died. I know I’m still Andy’s mother and always will be, but the outside world doesn’t see a child at my side. I feel like my role is diminished, shoved aside sometimes even by those who are important in my life.

But I know I’ll get through another Mother’s Day. And I hope I know Andy is watching me. I’ll send all of my love to him as always and ache to hold him, as always. The role of mother is sacred. I’ll carry it, and my son, with me for the rest of my life.

Peace and strength to all mothers who are facing this day without their children. May you be surrounded by your love for your child and the memories of the time they got to share with you. Please know you are not alone on this dark and difficult road. So many of us are traveling alongside you, even if we’ve never met.

Still here

In hiding, apparently. I can’t handle grief right now, this close to Mother’s Day and the anniversary of my mother’s death. In fact, I can’t handle grief in general. It seems like every other second I’m attempting to stop tears. Children and families seem to be everywhere. So…I’m ignoring things and this blog hasn’t been updated in over two weeks. I’ll resurface eventually. I’m just too tired to deal with grief for a while.