Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night, and my son is dead. That's the best description I can give for being slapped with reality in these moments. It's odd to me that after years of grief and very much "knowing" this fact, that it would continue to hit me SO hard at times.
It's mentioned frequently that grief is like a tidal wave when it hits out of nowhere. I can't believe the accuracy with which that describes the absolute blast of reality I experience. There is no special date or anything right now, and I've found throughout my grief life that these waves can be even more damning when the latter is true. A random Tuesday will hold so much pain and so much reality that your chest is crushed with the weight of it. Sometimes I'll be seemingly oblivious to anything but mundane tasks and I'll reach for an apple in the produce aisle of the grocery store and that sneaky bastard, Grief, will deliver a blow so devastating that I simply have to abandon that grief apple, as well as my cart and walk out of the store.
He isn't here. He isn't physically ever going to be here again. He won't see his siblings graduate, begin their careers, maybe marry and have children. That's real and right now it's so raw. My babies feel it too. I've seen it in them. Two of them recently left for college and the reality of who isn't here has hit, at times, with a new vengeance. I wish I could take their pain. But I also know that it is my grief, my pain, that connects me to that boy sometimes. It's the thing people can see. They can't see him, but they can look into our eyes and recognize that he was here, that he IS here. The dichotomy of raging against that grief while also pulling it close and holding onto it for dear life is something I couldn't have imagined if I'd tried.
As I get older, maybe wiser, certainly more grateful for the gifts in my life, I recognize that my grief has shaped this skin I'm in. It has tormented and twisted me inside and out. It has found me on a couch at 2am, listening to the sobs of my now teenager as he/she laments the loss. Grief has added lines and scars. It has shoved me to the depths of human despair, and has also raised me to a height I would have never known possible. I often don't know what to do with the absolute tsunami of grief I sometimes experience. All I know, is that sometimes, in the quietest dark, I wake suddenly and realize in the screaming silence that my son is dead.
