A lifetime of Grief...

Ava at the Wilson County Fair...eating a funnel cake. 

It's been 5 months...since I last held, touched, kissed my sweet Ava...150 days...3, 600 hours...How?

I  have “met” many friends who live in the same universe as me – the one that includes all the elements of an old life - but is now seen through a filter called Grief.   Friends who have lost their children to tragedy and illness.   I am connected to these friends in a way I can’t describe, nor need to.  We are just bonded.  When I see mourning parents on television, I relate in a way I never imagined – to know I could pick up my phone and call those complete strangers and  we could talk for hours.  We carry each others sorrow.   I know this sounds sad and awful.  But it’s not, it’s just a depth of understanding among a group of people that I don’t believe can be mirrored in many other sitations in life.

There have been 5 children gone too soon in this community in the past 5 months. Five children in five months!  I saw  today was the 18 year old's funeral...and I knew...how his parents felt...I knew just how impossible certain days can be.  Yet we still wake up the day after.  How?

Grief falls into a pattern in time.   The feeling of “floating”, as I call it, that stays for days, allowing you to carry on with life.  Then, for reasons known and sometimes not, the rug is pulled from you --ambushed– the Earth tilts the wrong way – the sky falls and you find yourself suffocating.  Quite litereally.  The "missing". The sense of their vacant space, their absence, the one they should be standing in, dancing in.  Where they should be laughing and growing and loving.  Where. They. Should. Be.

It’s indescribable and it’s unbearable and it’s so much more than we should have to endure, as humans.  As parents.  As fragile, hopeful, trusting people.  There is no ecaping, no cheering up, no stepping over.  When grief visits, everything stops.  And eventually, I guess, we become familiar with its presence and we allow it to pass through and ravage because we have no choice.  On the other side comes a sense of serenity and the "floating" returns, for a while.

Time makes it harder...for now. It’s hard to remember the "perfect" world...the world with my Ava, yet we could never forget.  Against what we thought possible, we carry on.

To many "floating" days to my bereaved friends.