The Evolving Monster of Grief

The Evolving Monster of Grief

From Second Glance, Jodi Picoult, page 303

“He imagined that no matter how it came about, losing a child was something that you kept coming back to, like the hole in your gum when you lost a tooth or a scar you’d worry with your fingertips-a disfigurement that you felt over and over.”   

‘Then’

Losing a child, something that so many people have written about, and some have been able to give me a moment or two of comfort, empathy. Losing a child is the event that a parent is forced to come back to, over and over and over again. Not because we want to remember the loss, but because we have no desire to forget the love that causes that “hole in your gum”. If only it were in the gum. The loss, instead, is deep inside our hearts.

Losing a child isn’t anything that can be described to another person, not even someone who is, unfortunately, in the same club. Every person’s loss is his or her own monster. Every day is its own mountain of pain and memories to climb and conquer. Reaching the pinnacle for climbers is usually met with a sense of relief and joy at looking at the downward, more easily traversed path. For a parent who has lost a child, the downward slope may present a slide into darkness that is hard to climb up out of again.

I know that when I feel the dark cloud of grief and melancholy approaching me it is felt with dread. Mourning is an exhausting process with no end. It will never end. It will be like this for always. That is the exhaustive part, the knowing that this loss is permanent, always, with no happy ending to reach. The goal is simply to survive the newest cloudbank, and await the next. 

Approaching the one-year mark is taking its toll on me. I feel myself sliding down the other side of the mountain, and I am tired of fighting for a foothold. I desire nothing more than to close my eyes and let the rocks and trees do their damage. 

Today at work we have an overhanging death threat, found in a boy’s bathroom stall, “Everyone will die on March 29,^th” written for people to read. Many of my colleagues stayed home. I came in. Not hoping that something happens; but, not afraid either. My partner would be appalled to hear me say this. My daughter would be pissed. I am simply being honest. I do not wish for death, but knowing it will reunite me with my son, my Robbie, my Boo-Bear, punk’n head, tator tot…I do not imagine myself fighting too hard against it either. 

I miss him too much on certain days. I miss his smile, and his charm, and his sense of obnoxious humor. I miss his loving ways toward all his younger cousins. I miss hearing him gripe about school and chores and how he has to do everything. I miss his morning grunts of hello and his bedtime hugs and kisses good-night. I miss his face in my house. I miss his laughter. I miss…and there is no end to that part of the mourning either. No happy ending. No do over. He is gone. And I don’t know how a mother is supposed to breathe in and out, over and over, each and every single day, knowing that a life she carried and protected for so long has been removed from this earth. 

It makes absolutely no sense that my son is dead. I left that morning with the joy of a beautiful day, a perfect weekend, and the hugs and kiss of my son on my face. We had plans for the afternoon. He had plans for the day. Plans, apparently, I had no knowledge of until I came home, and found his body splayed backward on his bed, the splash of his blood on the wall, the smell of death filling my house. A mother should never have to find her son this way. The image is in my head every moment that I live, awake and asleep, I can see it, hear it, feel it, taste it and hate it for always.

‘Now’

I wrote this eight years ago, as the first of a lifetime of death-iversaries approached. As I scrolled through my documents one afternoon, the title caught my attention. I didn’t remember writing it, until I browsed the first paragraphs; then, it sat, mostly unread, for weeks on the bottom of my screen before I was brave enough to read it entirely. I barely made it through.

What strikes me most, is the desperation it gives off. As I read it, and have reread it multiple times since, the sadness rolls outward, and I remember. That darkness remains, but is different now than then. Pieces of the writing are still word for word, spot on accurate, even nine years after losing my boy, as they will be in nineteen and ninety years I imagine. The senselessness of his absence, the list of things I miss, the exhaustive quality of mourning. These will always be part of my new normal. 

However, there are differences, too. When I speak with people who have lost someone, I assure them that this desperation will not always be such a sharpened blade. It doesn’t fade so much as finds a shelf to rest upon, occasionally dropping again into a moment before being replaced with something positive.

In the beginning, every second was overwhelming. That is loud and clear in the first piece of writing. Now grief is softer, an underlying thrum of loss, tempered with time. Now, breathing is easier, comes without the necessity of conscious thought, in and out, in and out. Then, dreams were frantic, my need to grab hold of him causing me to wake in a sweat. Now, my dreams are gentler, my hand on his face softer, smiling, even after I wake. Then, I might be fine, and at the drop of a hat, be sobbing in front of the milk cooler at Meijer. Now, well, now, that still happens, but less often and with more forewarning. Usually.

Then and Now. Now and Later. Like the quote from Jodi Picoult’s, Second Glance, the hole in my heart caused by what was lost that day will always be there. Every day I wake and know he is still gone, but I also wake and know that he is still with me, checking in, sending me signs. 

Tomorrow will still come. 

Now will become Then, just one more day to know my angels watch over me, to witness the love of friends and family, to openly receive the signs Robbie sends me, to live and laugh and love like I know he would want me to do, until I hold him once again.