A Day of Memories

  I might have had to let you go in life, but you will never be let go from my heart.  Today is a day full of memories. I think of how old my son would have been, and wonder how so much time has passed.

   The first few years passed with me just trying to get through another day without breaking down or telling everyone I came in contact with about my son. Some days it was hard to act normal as if my world hadn't just stopped. I wondered how everyone could just laugh and carry on around me as if something hadn't just died inside me. A family member told me I wasn't grieving properly because I was not going to group therapy to talk about my feelings, I felt like telling them to bury their child and then tell me the proper way to grieve, but I didn't wish this feeling on anyone. I knew how I felt and why, it wasn't going away, only time would lessen the pain. The pain of loosing a child is so all consuming it is a physical pain. You can't move at times, it's hard to even breath at others.

   About two to three years after he passed I realized this was my life and I needed to start living it again because I was still in my early twenties and couldn't live the rest of my life this way. Well that was the plan at least, but I can't say that's what happened. One day just seemed to roll into the next without me even knowing it. I would have random panic attacks, thinking will the pain never end? I would be driving down the road and a song would come on that would make me have a crying fit, sobbing in a parking lot just trying to catch my breath. It was the cycle of my life just trying to look "normal", a few good days followed by some really bad moments. I lived my life in fear that someone would see me and know I wasn't as strong as everyone thought I was. I was weak and scared everyone else would see. I couldn't handle the pity I would see.
 
  At some point I realize it was okay to hurt. Okay to be human. Okay to feel. I still morn the loss of never really knowing his voice, never hearing him call my name, never seeing his first steps, never holding my hand. I still morn those moments lost, but treasure the few I have. I have seen him smile. That memory will live on long after the never will be's have faded...We buried him the sixteenth of October, nineteen-ninety-nine.