The grief monster

I’ve written before about this time of year, the time of year leading up to the day the bottom fell out. Somewhere in between BJ’s birthday and February I start feeling like my nerve endings are starting to fray. Everything I touch I feel, like I’ve been partially holding my breath because I can’t quite take a deep enough breath to fill my lungs all the way up. I began feeling like I’m a second away from tears for no immediate reason other than an increasing ache of sadness. Every year I trick myself into thinking that this year will be different. After all, we lost Byron years ago. We’ve created a normalish life and I’m no longer consumed by grief.

But this time of year all I want to do is talk to Byron. I want to hold his hand or put my head on his shoulder and doze off while he watches ESPN. I want to ride in his truck with my feet on his dashboard. I want to gripe about petty stuff like cooking dinner or what time he gets home from work. I want to gossip with him about things I heard throughout the day. I want to feel the security of having someone who wants the best for me and loves me inspite of my sometimes selfishness or irritating ways. I want to see his face light up when he sees B2 the way it always lit up when he saw BJ. I ache to know what he thinks about B2. I want to hear him playing with his boys. I want the boys to have someone teach them to throw and tackle and shoot that loves them. I want to see them smile at him. And I want to laugh with him about their personalities (because they’ve got so much personality). I miss so much about him. We missed out on so much. HE missed out on so much. And the boys would be so much better with him to help guide them along the way. BJ is TEN. He’s growing into himself and looking so much like Byron that it takes my breath away. He holds his head the same way he did and he cares deeply the way he did as well. B2 is six. I was pregnant when we lost Byron. That’s six years of not knowing what it’s like to have two parents in love. To not have ever given his dad a hug or have given him a kiss. Not one picture of the two of them together. He tells people he doesn’t have a dad. The first time I heard him say it I felt gutted. BJ rushed to tell him that yes he does that their dad is just in Heaven but I could see in his eyes that in his little world the two things were so intermingled they were the same thing. To him, his dad is in Heaven so he doesn’t have one. It’s black and white to him. I still remind him his dad is in Heaven when I hear him say it but I don’t press the issue, there’s time later for that. I let him feel the way he needs to in order to live with the absence now.

I struggle with what is the right way to feel. I want to be a stronger person than I used to be. I don’t want to be the walking wounded forever. I want to be able to walk through the days leading up to the anniversary of Byron’s death without feeling like I’m weak or damaged. But here I am…again. My mantra has always been “you have to go through it to get through it” but I’m slowly beginning to wonder if I’ll ever get through it. I want to so bad. I’ve been told before that the price of love is grief. And I loved that man sometimes more than I loved myself sometimes (yes I know not healthy but I was young), my guess is that I’ll need to eventually accept this as a part of my life forever. I want to remember how it felt to be loved the way he loved me and BJ when he was here and I want to smile and think about what our family would have looked like had he been here to see it completed. In order to do that I also have to feel the pain of a dream deferred.

Focusing on the positive has gotten us so far though all of this but sometimes I feel like the list of wishes and wants I have for my family might be unobtainable because the scab I spend so much time creating gets ripped off every year. The ache will dull again as the months passwill, I’ll make it to March, the boys will be fine and life will move forward as it always does, without Byron and with a piece of my soul frozen forever in 2014.