Hmm...sudden realization that I haven't updated my blog in a while, and I'd like to say I could blame it on warm, sunny weather and the completion of many outdoor activities, but I can't. It has been cold here, for the most part, and not conducive to weeding, planting, or mulching. I am still (always) trying to tidy up my house and, despite my vow to make this year the year I get myself organized....well, you can guess.
Time waits for no man, or woman, so they say, and that is proving itself true here In the Land of Broken Hearts. I will never be able to keep up, and just when I think I might manage it, something changes, and I feel I am always preparing for the change. Which, quite honestly, may or may not come. I try to live my life by the wonderful philosophical/spiritual advice of those life-balance gurus, The Beatles, and just "let it be...there will be an answer, let it be."
But I suck at letting it be.
Showing posts with label Time. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Time. Show all posts
Friday, April 23, 2010
Sunday, January 3, 2010
All This Time
After all this time, six years, I thought I might feel differently. I thought that maybe I wouldn't think of him every day, maybe I wouldn't still cry on his death day and birth day. But what did I know, back then? Not much, quite obviously.
I'm feeling very sad today, sadder than I could have imagined once upon a time. It's ok, I know, but at times I am so tired of feeling sad, so tired of missing Ben. I don't feel sad every day, but this week - well, this week is different, as I remember what we so nearly had. The Christmas songs don't help, the lights, the ornaments, all of it. Those things have always made me feel melancholy, long before my child died, and now, viewed through the lens of my loss, make me feel even worse.
In six years, what have I learned? That I will always miss him, every day, for as long as I live, or at least until Alzheimer's or some other form of dementia takes my memories of him away. Missing him is forever. Sad is forever too, but not in the same way. That will come and go. And I have realized that I will forever be the mother of a baby; as the rest of us grow older, as my two other children will grow to adulthood, as my husband and I begin to go gray, Ben will always be as he was the day he died: an infant, full of potential and possibility. Is it any wonder, then, how I long for a baby in my life? Any wonder that my arms still ache, after all this time, for the chance to hold him again?
I'm feeling very sad today, sadder than I could have imagined once upon a time. It's ok, I know, but at times I am so tired of feeling sad, so tired of missing Ben. I don't feel sad every day, but this week - well, this week is different, as I remember what we so nearly had. The Christmas songs don't help, the lights, the ornaments, all of it. Those things have always made me feel melancholy, long before my child died, and now, viewed through the lens of my loss, make me feel even worse.
In six years, what have I learned? That I will always miss him, every day, for as long as I live, or at least until Alzheimer's or some other form of dementia takes my memories of him away. Missing him is forever. Sad is forever too, but not in the same way. That will come and go. And I have realized that I will forever be the mother of a baby; as the rest of us grow older, as my two other children will grow to adulthood, as my husband and I begin to go gray, Ben will always be as he was the day he died: an infant, full of potential and possibility. Is it any wonder, then, how I long for a baby in my life? Any wonder that my arms still ache, after all this time, for the chance to hold him again?
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Shadows
I just read a post over at Moments of Pause, about missing children, shadows, photos notable for an absence known and seen by a very few.
Fuzzy, indistinct outlines of what might have been. I have wanted a shadow to appear in my family photographs since Ben died, to represent who should be there. An outline of what's missing, for all the world to know.
That's not how it works, is it? The whole world doesn't want to know what we have lost, and I can't say I blame them. I understand. I wouldn't have wanted to know either, if I hadn't lost a child of my own. And some days, even now, I don't want to know of other people's pain, because my heart is full from so many stories, so many losses, so much grief at what I almost had.
It feels, some days, that I have already had a lifetime to get used to being without Ben, though it is closing in on six years. Six years is forever, and no time at all. I think of my friend, the one I told you about in my last post, in her second month without her boy, only beginning to learn what life means now without him. Her daughter is in kindergarten, and the last time we met she told me how, since meeting me, she thinks of Ben every day when she drops her daughter off at school, sends her into the very same classroom where I expect Ben would have started his elementary school education. Knowing that, if things had gone differently, Ben would be playing with her child. She thinks of him while her daughter plays on the playground after school, thinks of the two of them running around together. She thinks of the shadow in my life, knowing she has only begun a lifetime of remembering her own.
She's given me a gift, I think, by remembering what is lost. Seeing the outline, the shadow, of what will never be.
Fuzzy, indistinct outlines of what might have been. I have wanted a shadow to appear in my family photographs since Ben died, to represent who should be there. An outline of what's missing, for all the world to know.
That's not how it works, is it? The whole world doesn't want to know what we have lost, and I can't say I blame them. I understand. I wouldn't have wanted to know either, if I hadn't lost a child of my own. And some days, even now, I don't want to know of other people's pain, because my heart is full from so many stories, so many losses, so much grief at what I almost had.
It feels, some days, that I have already had a lifetime to get used to being without Ben, though it is closing in on six years. Six years is forever, and no time at all. I think of my friend, the one I told you about in my last post, in her second month without her boy, only beginning to learn what life means now without him. Her daughter is in kindergarten, and the last time we met she told me how, since meeting me, she thinks of Ben every day when she drops her daughter off at school, sends her into the very same classroom where I expect Ben would have started his elementary school education. Knowing that, if things had gone differently, Ben would be playing with her child. She thinks of him while her daughter plays on the playground after school, thinks of the two of them running around together. She thinks of the shadow in my life, knowing she has only begun a lifetime of remembering her own.
She's given me a gift, I think, by remembering what is lost. Seeing the outline, the shadow, of what will never be.
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