Grieving Out Loud

Grieving Out Loud My beautiful son died on Oct 27, 2023. We buried him today, Nov 6. I need to write out loud.

05/31/2025

Lately I've been thinking, thinking about who I was going to become as an older person. The cheerfulness I would have brought to my circle of friends and family, the potential in me.

My son's loss goes wide and goes deep. The world lost him, his friends and family lost his potential, his love, his humor, his smile. And there is the secondary loss of me and of his brother's potential.

One life affects so many. A wide expanse and deep.

In my youth I used to hear the wind sometimes, softly and sorrowfully calling. That wind, carries the loss of all the potential that never had its chance, its chance to grow and bring to the world its song. Those songs, I still hear, in the woods.

05/31/2025

I want to sit, sit by myself without any expectations from anyone that I move and "do something". I want to sit on an empty beach, with the water, wrapped in a towel and have a kind lady bring me coffee from a cottage. I want to sit on that beach, by the cottage wrapped up in a towel and let the water lick my feet and slowly, I want to let the water surround me. I want to sit there until time ends, wrapped in a towel with a kind lady bringing me coffee watching the birds and the crabs. I want to sit.

05/18/2025

I'm drifting in space without a tether. All the reason for being here vanished in that instant.

04/13/2025

It's 6:30 pm, here I am getting into bed. I tell myself I'm just going to relax a bit, but the fact is I'll stay here until morning. Not sleeping really, lightly dozing, scrolling, z-quill to help reduce the memories.

The day of your funeral, family surrounded us. Friends came to share the grief, to mourn. A few days later the closest people got to pack up, pull out of the driveway and drive back home. I can't get home ever again, "home" doesn't exist for me anymore. I knew how they must have felt, putting distance between themselves and my tragedy, a dead son, a casket. How easier the air was for them to breathe as they got to leave. I hated everyone in the world who got to breathe that day and I hated myself for hating the world.

How do I learn how to love a new world? One that's forever empty?

On my walk today, I decided to loop counterclockwise instead of my clockwise. I used to alternate but on the day Russel...
03/23/2025

On my walk today, I decided to loop counterclockwise instead of my clockwise. I used to alternate but on the day Russell died, I was walking counterclockwise at the park an hour before I found out. After that, I felt from now on, I will only walk clockwise. Maybe a bit of superstition.

As we started out, me and Sid, I let my mind wander as it always does. It wanders to Russell, what happened that night, I ask for some understanding and peace. I told Sid, God wants us to walk the other way round today, I don't know why.

By the time we reached the woods, I had forgotten about the change in direction or my conversation with God and as usual me and Sid just walked, stopped to explore and sniff.

We walk pretty slow. Looking down was this frog. So completely perfect. She was just sitting, not hopping, not searching, just sitting. Sid gave her a sniff and I gave her a photo shoot.

I have always believed that animals are God's avatars, put her for us spirits, in our earthly embodiment, to gaze upon the beauty of God, to remind us that truth and beauty are always perfect.

Here she sits, I got to be reminded today.

03/16/2025

Pity, yes it's here. Sympathy too. Anger, yes a lot of anger. Sorrow. Emptiness. Incomplete, lost and forever lonely. Impossible. Even hysteria. Disbelief.

These "words" are part of me now.

03/11/2025

I never knew you were the glue.
I always thought I was.

I never thought of me minus you.
I always thought I'd go first.

I never imagined a future so bare.
I always thought you'd be here.

I never knew you were the glue.

03/04/2025

Once at the beach, it was just me & Russ sitting by the water, I turned my head, looked back around and he was not in my eyes. He was just 2 years old. I immediately stood up and shouted his name, there he was, about 10 feet from our blanket, looking at me with his beautiful blue eyes, squinting in the sun. Those brief moments of panic, losing the bottom or as Michael Stipe would sing, "losing my religion".

The day in October of 2023, I called his phone because I hadn't gotten my morning text. It went right to voicemail and the bottom of the Earth opened up and emptied the ocean in a split second. The glacial dam broke and permanently changed the landscape.

These days I'm closed off. The pain of my memory is just too much. I live in very small spaces, moments. This morning when my pup and I were on our walk, I kept examining pinecones. The perfection of the pinecone, the tiny tree like thing it is, the seed cases, that's me now, in the pinecone, just existing in that bit of nature. Not much anymore am I'm not asking God why. God's got reasons no mortal gets to understand.

I like to remember my early years with Russell. Those moments when he, like me, would pick up a rock or a pinecone and explore.

For parents who lose our children, how do we manage without our sons or daughters? Maybe in a way, we don't. Maybe we lose our religion like the song says and maybe that's ok. I know my post is too long and disjointed but I don't mind. Sorrow is my companion now.

02/20/2025

I remember when I was a little girl, I would check under my bed at night, and in the closet, to be sure there were no monsters hiding there, waiting to get me in my sleep. As I got older, I forgot all about monsters, demons, mythical creatures hiding in the darkness to steal life. Always lurking.

In my adult life, I would have said those thoughts were childish, folly, just imagination. Never did I even think about the darkness that's lurking there, waiting.

In October of 2023, my beautiful son died. Unexpected, sudden, no goodbye. And then I realized, the monster is actually real, it's always been there and it will always be there. Not just for me, for everyone. Tragic death is not some mythical being, not folklore but reality. My reality.

Unless a parent sees that monster of darkness wrapped around their child laying in a casket, they do not know. They do not know what I know, what mourning mothers know. And they are better off not knowing.

02/19/2025

It's snowing here today. This is the first snow since you left this world, that hurts. Everything hurts, always. You made a snowman the last time it snowed like this. And that hurts too. But once only once, I wish I had a wish, I'd wish to hold you in my arms, forever. Eternity is in an infinite moment, you with me and me with you. How I miss you, I wish you knew.

02/10/2025

It's cold here, and very quiet. Random static sometimes drifts close by, sounds of kids, birds, a squirrel in dry leaves. Maybe that's what Paul Simon sings about, the sound of silence.

The tether has so much slack now. Me drifting farther and farther away from the glitter globe. At times I'm drifting in currents of ice cold, like in a lake.

In the beginning, somehow I thought I'd find a solution. But reality is solid, unmovable. It feels like a stain is seeping into my skin, slowly, slowly, seeping. Molecule by molecule like with wood. Changing the finish, staining.

Surrender. Not because I'll be saved but because I cannot win. What I now know is that this silence was there before you, me, life and it will be there forever. But there was something and any something is always better than nothing.

01/17/2025

Often I find myself feeling so defeated. So ready to give up the ghost. My mind has an exit plan, it's there in my brain, just in case. Life without my son, Russell, feels impossible.

But today, and for months, I got up and I tried. Faith isn't like I either have faith or I don't. For me, faith is that I try. Simply try. I may fail, I may even only fail, but that one degree that I try, that's faith.

Today I took my dog to the park, I talked to my brother on the phone, I got what I need to fix chili for tomorrow when we have overnight company. Just to try, that's faith.

Back in my first life, all the puzzle pieces were locked in place. My life, my family, my world was complete. That world blew apart and the jigsaw puzzle now has disappeared, maybe just two pieces out of a thousand. Instead of rebuilding, because I cannot, maybe I can just show up with these two pieces and try.

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