Thursday, May 15, 2014

The weight...

On our honeymoon in St. Lucia - 2007
A friend sent me a screenshot recently from another friend of hers who had lost one of her young babies earlier this year. My heart sinks when I think of something like this, because I think of what I'm feeling and times it by a million. Maybe more. Losing a child, no matter what age, is not something anyone should have to go through.
The screenshot was a facebook post that her friend had put up following the death of her child. And it went something like this "Sometimes I wish I could ask someone to hold the sadness for me, just for a minute, just so I can remember was it was like to really breathe without the weight of it."
This is probably the most accurate description I can think of for what I feel right now. The weight. I feel like an elephant is sitting on my chest all day long. Some days the elephant is heavier than others. There are moments when it's so heavy I'm not even sure if I can breathe. And others when it lifts a little and I'm OK for a few minutes. Or an hour. But it's there, all the time. When I wake up, as I go about my day, when I go to bed, all night long, when I look at my kids. The weight of my sadness and grief is there and it is impossible to escape. And I wonder when it might ease up a little bit. I don't think I will ever get out from under it. When something like this happens, you don't ever lose it. The loss is so great and so immense that nothing will ever make it 'go away'. The weight gets heavy when I see his picture, see something he would wear, think I see him somewhere. When I get home from work and settled in, only to realize he's not coming home. When I go to pick up my phone and call him, or I think of something I want to tell him... 'honey you'll never guess what Adella did today!'... find something he wrote, see a show he loved. And for a brief second I am thinking that he's still here. And then it's over and the weight of him being gone settles in on me like a tide rolling in off the ocean. Smothering me. Drowning me. And I am reaching for the shore, but keep getting pulled back in. It's inescapable and it's suffocating. And for one day - an hour or a minute even - I'd like to have it taken off of me. Lifted away so I could feel 'normal' and really breathe again.




1 comment:

  1. I think we would all carry some of this weight for you if we could, Abi.

    <3

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