“Nineteen”
“Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All of that unspent love gathers in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in the hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.” ―
I have been asking myself all week why I am not doing better with
this. Why I am not farther along and why
I still fall apart during this week each year.
I seem to put pressure on myself as the years go by to be more put
together and to handle Liam’s birthday more gracefully than I am capable. I don’t know why I do that to myself. I know that if I were talking to a patient or
a friend I would be much kinder and much more understanding than I am to
myself. So when I read the quote above
it resonated. I have all this love and
it has nowhere to go so it makes sense for me to be off-kilter.
The fact that I am not as kind to myself as I should be is something
I am working on in therapy. Yes I am a
therapist in therapy. It is a case of I
can’t see the forest for the trees… I am
good at helping other people but not at helping myself so I manage to take my
own advice on this one and I get help from someone myself. My therapy sessions are intense and
enlightening and I am all the better at my job because I work to understand how
I cope or don’t cope and how I can move through life with more ease and comfort
than I have in the past.
Back
to yesterday… Our first-born son, Liam,
would have been, should have been, nineteen.
He was born with a complex combination of Transposition of the Greater
Arteries (a heart condition) and Pulmonary Hypertension (a lung condition) that
proved fatal and he died when he was 68 days old. He had open-heart surgery when he was four
days old and lived with oxygen and a broviac line in his chest and a complex
regimen of medications. His short life
was not easy and I think he was in pain and struggled to breath. There is a part of me that was relieved when
he died, partly because he was suffering, but when I allow myself to be
completely honest, I was also relieved for myself. I was living in a constant state of adrenalin
because I was to be his primary caregiver and with him 24-7 and responsible for
his needs and all those complicated medications and after being trained by a
pharmacist to administer the medications, I was not entirely sure I was up to
the task. Mothers are not supposed to be
relieved when their children die you see.
They are supposed to walk through fire for their children and I would
have, did do, but I was terrified. I struggle with those feelings because, as a
mother, I have guilt over having them.
Mostly though, I miss him. Mostly I want to hold him again and touch his sweet face. I long to know what he would be like today. I have strong and fascinating relationships with his younger brother and sister and I would give just about anything to talk to him and know him as he would be today. I would love to have a conversation with him and find out who he would have been. I do have all this love inside that has nowhere to go.
There is nowhere to put the years of stored up packed lunches, birthday party themes, favorite meals and Christmas mornings. There are years-worth of boo-boos and scrapes gone un-kissed and tears gone un-wiped, laughter gone un-heard. So many secret worries and after-school stories I have heard from his siblings that I haven’t listened to from him. School plays, art-shows, cringe-worthy music concerts, sporting events and parent-teacher conferences, tantrums and fights.
Last night we went back to the Ronald McDonald House to cook dinner for the families because they have opened that option up again since COVID. We could take eight people and Frank and I went down to start the process off with Dermot and Wren. We were met by his sister Erin and her husband Mark and joined thereafter by Aunt Gail and my partner Tony. They have an industrial kitchen now and serve upwards of 200 meals each night. It’s quite an undertaking now – a far cry from the smaller operation it was when we started doing this years ago in Liam’s honor. I was outside on the walkway at one point looking for Liam’s memorial brick and ran into a father and his toddler who were staying at the house. She had Down’s Syndrome but they were staying there because her little sister had been born six weeks ago with an insulin problem and needed to be flown in from Michigan. I showed him Liam’s brick and he asked me how old Liam would have been. We talked for a few minutes and he thanked me for volunteering. I said it was a pleasure to be able to do something in his honor, and it is. It is something I think I can do each year with all that unspent love.
Grief is not linear. In the beginning it is blinding and there is no way to see around it. Slowly I felt as though I was able to see a little better with grief on the periphery. Eventually, over time, the grief shifted to the side and began to walk beside me. I allowed it to become a part of me rather than trying to reject it. I made peace with it and treated it with kindness, most of the time. It’s like a sad, calm sea – vast in its expanse. Its tide always coming in, and, at times the tide is high and I feel it coming up dangerously close and threatening to overwhelm me, but the tide always goes back out again.
