December 10, 2010

Blue Christmas

I know that time will not heal my wounds or my pain, but instead it will leave scars that will surface without any warning or predictable rhythm.  That is what I know because I live that everyday.  Unpredictable attacks of grief, sadness, pain and longing for my son.

We have an empty chair, a lost family member, a son that is missing. Christmas traditions are now altered. Instead of allowing Christmas to come full force and decorating, shopping, gathering lists and requests….I want to hear nothing of it, I do not want to see lights or trees, and I am procrastinating doing any type of shopping. Not only on these days do I miss my son, but I am without his family…his girls and his wife. I am missing 4 people on these holidays, just like every other day, and it is hard.

On Thanksgiving I had to leave the table, and go sit by myself. It just didn’t seem right to not talk about Fred and remember him on that day…..when all I could do is think of him.

I must say, I am preoccupied with death. Not just my own, more death as a whole and the bigger meaning of walking through this life up to our final days. We hear it all the time that we should live for the moment, live like we are dying, live our lives to the fullest extent. Some use these clichés as comforting words for those who grieve or for those who are sick. Some use the words as an excuse, a way to detach from accountability. And then there are even some that use the words for a type of hope. Hope that maybe somehow within the dark days there will be flashes of greatness.

I do not know my calling in life. I do not understand why I am here and what the master plan is. I cannot wrap my head around the why of any of what is happening in my life. I find great pain, uncertainty, and confusion when looking forward to any type of future beyond the current day. My grief is complicated and disjointed most of the time. Nothing is happening in a neat order with predictability or routine. Things feel messy and blocks of my life crumble, each a little more everyday.

It is instinctive for me to try and hold everything together for my family. Everything. Picture the man running up and down a line of spinning plates on top of wooden dowels…20, 30, or maybe even 50 plates all spinning at the same time. That is me. And the plates are beginning to crash to the floor, one by one, breaking into pieces, leaving sharp edges that cut…..and less room to maneuver back and forth.

I cannot Google the answers to my questions, and what the hell would I type anyway…”Where do I find my sanity?”, “Why did he do it?”, “How to mend a broken family 101”, “Why am I here?” “What is the lesson?” I would type for hours. Unfortunately the little line on the Google search page is not a crystal ball. There is no way to answer the questions I have, no where to research and no book to give me the missing pieces. The questions do not go away, and the constant drilling through time leading up to…and that night…and the time after. Scenarios play out, “maybe clues” surface, conversations rewind and replay, comments, statements, songs….I drown in questions, daily.

While I breathe, I hope. This is true. With each breath I take and have taken since my son died just so few short months ago….I hope. I may not be conscious of this hope, but it is there. I would not be living today and writing in my journal if there was not some type of hope for me, my family, and our future together.

Anger is something I do not understand in this process. It comes out sometimes, the anger, in misdirected and confusing ways. Am I angry at the world? At God? Am I angry at Fred? I have no clue.

Time continues to tick away. People have moved on, while I remain stuck in a cyclone of grief that is unexplainable. What will happen? Will the plates in the air continue to fall? Will my attempts, as a mother and a wife fail…will I not be able to save anyone else…. While I try and head off anything bad in the kids lives…is my own continuing to suffer? So what is it that you do, what is the answer?

Life is beautiful, it has many gifts to offer all of us, in so many ways. Our precious time on this earth is a gift in itself and what we do with it is all up to us. Some of us work hard at making life constant and beautiful while staying productive and successful. Some of us work hard at destroying the gift any way we know how. Some of us don’t care. Some of us gave up years ago. Just like Fred, we all have free will. That is a gift also. I move back and forth between all of the above but landing somewhere in between beautiful and destruction on most days. I pick up broken plates and bandage my cut fingers on a daily basis…all while trying to find answers and hope.