Frozen

Calvin's birthday and angel day are coming fast. I don't know how to feel about these days, other than the looming sense of dread that's been creeping over me this past month. Part of me is incredulous that I have survived the death of my child for OH MY GOD, a year already. How does that happen? It's almost a sense of shame that my life continued when his did not. These past eleven months have been at the least, defining. At the apex of my grief, and in the aftermath of my son's death, I would say things have become catastrophic. Our lives have fallen completely apart. Neither Shane nor I know where to begin in assembling our new lives since losing Calvin. Any last vestige of normal has fallen away and the new uncomfortable is the coat I now wear. I don't know how to do it. I don't think we've been coping well. I'm still breathing and I'm still able to love and look after the girls but so much has changed that I don't know myself or Shane these days.

I used to be one of those passionate movie watchers that would get so into the movie I was watching that I would holler at the screen. I could see ahead to where the plot was taking us and I often felt a sense of dread knowing the main character was doing something or not doing something that was going to keep him out of danger. It's almost as if I have stepped outside myself and am watching my life play out in front of me. I can see the catastrophe looming all around us, evidence of that is everywhere but it's like my feet are frozen in a pond of ankle deep water. I feel helpless to move, to change, to step out from beneath the darkness. Why? Because I don't know this life. Because I don't know how to cope, to get on with things, to step out of my feelings and this new sense of "normal" to live despite of the fact that my son has died. My life is being created all over again and I don't like it. I don't like the feeling of sadness in my heart all the time. I don't like knowing that I held my son and watched him die and was helpless to do anything about it. I don't like knowing that our family is forever incomplete now that he is gone. I don't like the things that have happened to us while we are trying to work through this mess of feelings and this new horrible beginning to our lives. My marriage has suffered terribly. My children have suffered from having a mother who isn't one hundred percent with them anymore. My husband has suffered, lashing out in unhealthy ways, angry at what has happened to us. We have slowly watched things around us fall apart. I don't know if it's the way it's supposed to be or not. My life stopped being the same the moment Calvin took his last breath, so maybe all the things that have happened is part of some sort of shedding, layer by layer I watch as everything in my life falls apart. I just don't know what to do about it. Do I pick up the pieces and try and patch them together and try to repair all that's been damaged in the last eleven months? Or do I accept that it's futile to want any semblance of the life I had before my son back? Is this where we start over again, building hope, building relationships with our children, building our marriage and family relationships over? I'm so tired of feeling suspended in my own life, watching everything around me fall apart. I hate to think this is where my life has come to and that I have to accept it. I want more and better and happier out of my life than I've had in this shitty eleven months. There's got to be more than this feeling of helpless empty....