Remember....
I am remembering you today. I am baking apple pies and I know you would have wanted to help. I am remembering coming home from your bone marrow transplant and celebrating Thanksgiving with you, in that blissful in-between when we still had some hope of your recovery, not just from the transplant but from the cancer and that ordeal as a whole. We still had hope for your life. It was a precious time, gilded and golden now in my memory. Pictures taken in my mind drift in hazy softness around my consciousness and I have you here, with me.
I was driving around doing some errands earlier today and contemplating some of the grief information that has come to me recently. I still remain pretty stuck I'm afraid. I am scared to let go of the sharpness of my missing you. I am scared to let you drift to a background thing. Questions and anxieties that only another grieving person might understand have prevented me from wholly embracing this life without you. I still miss you acutely. I still feel shock that it approaches six years since we said goodbye and let you go. And graduating from nursing school released a stop-gap that I had blanketed over the whole "moving on" thing without me even realizing it.
I tried out a new sensation today and it was so, so brief...but for one little second, I was able to feel what it might be like to remember you without this intense, burning sorrow. Without this dark, private, quiet little room that I keep hidden away, where I retreat to in furtive steps in between the other punctuation points of life. What if I let that little room go and just remembered you with joy? What would that mean?
I don't know the answer to it. I am scared to try it and not entirely sure why. I treasure so much this only relationship I have left with you, but I recognize it is not healthy nor good for me. I cannot fathom "letting you go".
So as I think of you today and remember you coming home for the last time, I am trying out what it feels like to just feel the happiness of those times and not the modifier of my sadness that we won't see you at the table yet again this year. I carry you in my pocket. I carry you in my heart.
Happy Thanksgiving Joe-Gi. I am thankful I got to be Mom, both to you and to your brothers.
I was driving around doing some errands earlier today and contemplating some of the grief information that has come to me recently. I still remain pretty stuck I'm afraid. I am scared to let go of the sharpness of my missing you. I am scared to let you drift to a background thing. Questions and anxieties that only another grieving person might understand have prevented me from wholly embracing this life without you. I still miss you acutely. I still feel shock that it approaches six years since we said goodbye and let you go. And graduating from nursing school released a stop-gap that I had blanketed over the whole "moving on" thing without me even realizing it.
I tried out a new sensation today and it was so, so brief...but for one little second, I was able to feel what it might be like to remember you without this intense, burning sorrow. Without this dark, private, quiet little room that I keep hidden away, where I retreat to in furtive steps in between the other punctuation points of life. What if I let that little room go and just remembered you with joy? What would that mean?
I don't know the answer to it. I am scared to try it and not entirely sure why. I treasure so much this only relationship I have left with you, but I recognize it is not healthy nor good for me. I cannot fathom "letting you go".
So as I think of you today and remember you coming home for the last time, I am trying out what it feels like to just feel the happiness of those times and not the modifier of my sadness that we won't see you at the table yet again this year. I carry you in my pocket. I carry you in my heart.
Happy Thanksgiving Joe-Gi. I am thankful I got to be Mom, both to you and to your brothers.
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