Oh Michael
It’s almost been a year, which seems improbable. Each day
for almost a year I wake up and it’s June 11th 2016, the first day
of the rest of dad and I’s lives without you. Masks are wonderful things kiddo,
they hide a lot but one thing is for sure, the shift of mourning looks different
but the pain has not lessened. I just juggle it better.
I keep going back to that last morning with you. You
convincing me to grab you a burrito at the market while you showered so we
could have breakfast together. The last hug and kiss on the cheek. Then the I
will call you later let you know if I am staying at friends or coming home.
Then Love you, see you bye. And 5 hours later my world imploded, I imploded.
I am learning how to miss you. Tears are of course a daily
occasion but deeper than that reconciling that you are never coming back. I was
never in delusion of some Lazarus rising equation but knowing in my head and
knowing in my heart are two different things. My head knew, the heart well it
just figured it out. Ironically as I did my body had massive infection, abscess
in tissues close to my heart. No mind body connection there huh kiddo. With
this illness came a deep inflection that no my son is not coming back, my heart
has to close that door and open a new one to making peace with that. You are
still with me every day in all I do and in my heart. Yet my time to be with you
won’t be until I leave this world. That is so hard baby, I want my son, I miss
my son. I see folks wasting opportunities with their kids and I want to scream there
is no second chance. Don’t fuck it up. The halls get longer the void gets
bigger . The heart breaks daily.
My biggest challenges are still my faith and my fury. I
blindingly angry that adults wasted your life, your childhood and the real you,
your life began at 16 only to end so soon. I am angry that we did everything
right as parents and loved you unconditionally and you were taken sudden and
violently. I am so angry that God took you back and that you like every other
teen on a nice day drove too fast and Iost you, we all lost you. I am angry
that I lost you my greatest joy. I doubt a lot I do Michael but in raising you,
being your mom, I never questioned it. I knew from my gut and heart how to
parent you, love you, and support you. As a mom it was the one thing I knew I
did right. And now I do not know or trust anything anymore. I know I have to
have peace with God, you are with him and he is my path to peace and you, but it’s
so hard at times to reconcile faith and pain being one in the same.
My other challenge is I never knew the will to love and the
will to die are different things. Let’s be real, the day I had to leave you at the
funeral home is the day I did think about ending it and joining you and grandpa
and grandma. And then I looked at dad, and your dog and our friends and family
and decided it is not for me to decide when I leave this world and how selfish
it would be. So yes I have no will to die. But the will to live, be engaged in
the world without blinding rage or a mask is hard. It is hard to engage at
times kiddo, my heart can’t always get there. We are also in the most hateful,
greedy and confused period of human history in several decades and your emphatic mom is getting slayed in this energy of pain and fear. I really need
to mourn you in a kind world but that’s not where it is right now, so instead I
search for kindness to make the world I want but its energy that is hard to
expend right now. I make mistakes, I get rough and emotional and sound off. But
trying to give myself grace in that I am just emotionally bleeding at times and
hopefully grace will be granted.
I love you kiddo, I miss you Michael
Love forever Mom
