My son is supposed to be 6 tomorrow. Just yesterday he was born. Just yesterday he died. But still, somehow, 6 years have passed.
That is hard for me to say, that is hard for me to write, and my grief has been wedged into a spot that makes it hard for me to express to those who have not also lost a child. But I’ve been oddly reminded by strangers in these last two days that sometimes after expression of great suffering comes a little relief. And these past 6 years have been a time of great suffering.
There is no beauty that results from losing a child. There is no “at least,” silver lining, good, better, reason, comfort, solace, healing, getting over, moving on, resolve, glad, hope, or looking toward any type of future that comes after holding your own child’s dead body.
Different aspects of surviving Henry’s death and having an invisible motherhood get hard for different reasons as time goes by. Some things shift and get easier to bear. But time, my friends, does not heal over a grief or loss of this magnitude. So long as I love my son, the grief I have and the loss of him will never stop existing.
Though ever present, grief has provided some grace in the last two years, allowing some stretches of time when it feels a little more normal to breathe. Sometimes I look inside and can see glimpses of myself again, and I see I am still funny and kinda badass. The quiet of the first year of the pandemic felt good on my heart, so much that I often and intensely crave again that sense of universal halting of all unnecessary things in the world outside. But I find it again when I work with my bees.
At times I am able to step back and recognize the wide and vast capacity of love, and just how powerful it really is. I marvel at how one feeling can bring fullness, expansion, and elevation while simultaneously causing such profound emptiness, deficit, and pain. I ponder how being exposed to its full spectrum influences this constructed human concept of choice and how I continue to live.
Because of love, we grieve. For as long as I deeply love my son as a living mother, I will profoundly grieve his human absence. Like a force I can’t define, I often feel l my son, his guidance, and the love he gifted me. I am struck and washed by his magnificence and power. While his body and his life is what I want, fundamentally long for, miss, and look for, his soul, guidance, and love are what I have and look to. I do everything I can to keep my son close and to live through him and because of him. But oh how badly I want him closer. To be able to have him the way a living mother is supposed to have her living son.
But healing? Good? Conclusion? Because of? But? At least? There is none of that here, and none of that I will ever seek. And that, as an offering to you, is ok: Grief cannot be solved, fixed, or made better. For now, on his 6th birthday, I just need proclamation of suffering to bring this bereaved mother’s heart a little relief.
