It's true, grief never ends.

Right now, I'm watching Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.  There's a scene towards the end where Cedric Diggery's father cries over his son's dead body, and I nearly broke down.  It's very hard for me to watch movies where a parent grieves over the loss of their child(ren) - for me, the pain is all too real.  It was years before I could watch Jackson's The Two Towers, because of Bernard Hill's (adlibbed) line "No parent should have to bury their child."

Time does not heal all wounds, let no one tell you that.  Time may teach you how to live with an open wound, but it never heals.

It's been several years since I updated this blog.  However, recently on Facebook the subject has reared its ugly head again.  It has now been a long five years since Tim left us, and I had been rather proud how I've managed to "heal" from it.  Turns out I'm wrong.
I still feel a tremendous loss, that will never go away.  But time and time again, the subject comes up on FB, and I always try to respond to (or even initiate) the discussions.  It's my hope that by sharing my pain, not only will it lessen but that I can help others deal with theirs.  It's Spider Robinson's "Law of Conservation of Pain and Joy" - which says "pain shared is pain lessened, joy shared is joy multiplied.  If I can let others know that we share their pain, perhaps I can help them get through it just that much easier.

Another year has gone by.  I don't believe it's been that long since I've posted.  I think we've healed as much as one could expect by now.  Our lives are continuing, without him.  It's like a major wound - it may heal over, but the scars will always remain, as will the residual pain.  There is a hole in my being that will never go away.

This evening, at sunset, we once again spread flower petals (plumeria?) off the OB Pier, this time accompanied by Tim's aunt and uncle, and also his cousin.  It was very nice, and comforting.  Afterwards, we all went out to dinner and remembered Tim in our own ways.  It was a very good remembrance this year.

The grief will always be with me, there's never a day that I don't feel it.  But I think that I've (we've both?) learned how to keep living our lives.  We will always miss him, but the best way to honor his memory is to embrace life as much as he did.

Goodbye, son.

Well, today's the day - in fact, right now.  It has been one year to the moment that we got the news.  Over the past several months, things had gotten to be better - the grief had lessened to the point that we were able to continue with our normal lives.  But the past two weeks, at least for me, have been hell.  As we approached Tim's first yahrzeit (Yiddish term, literally meaning "year time" but used as the anniversary of losing a loved one) all the grief seems to have come back to me.

I have taken today off of work, not to take an extra long weekend, but to be with Tim's mom on this day - she needs me infinitely more today than my job does - and I have a really good boss, she's in total agreement with me over that.

We do have some plans for observing this date.  We have ordered a beautiful lei to put on his surfboard, which is mounted over our living room window.  (Nice to have a vaulted ceiling.)  Today, we also will be mounting his shelf and putting his urn and photo (and a few other keepsakes) "up on a shelf" right by the surfboard.  We ordered some really nice shelf brackets - they are 1/4" steel dolphins, hand made.  We found a beautiful piece of wood (red mahogany?) which I have been finishing off by hand - one more coat of stain this morning, a final smoothing, then up on the wall it (and he) goes.  We'll also be hanging out some time today down in P.B., probably at the end of PB Drive, like we did for his birthday.

And maybe I'll write more later, I just woke up and had to put something down because it was the exact same date and time as when we got the news, and for me that will forever be the moment at which we lost our son.

Happy Birthday?

I came home to my wife crying today.  Tomorrow is Tim's birthday.  And she was so upset she thought it was today -- and finding out it's really tomorrow only made it worse. 

It's been over a month since we lost her father.  The funeral was nice enough, with full military honors.  (He was a veteran of WWII, Korea, AND Nam!  He earned it.)  But it's rough.  Having lost two close family members in one year is too many.  (Two too many?)  Even though we had been expecting it with Jack for a few years, it still hit hard.  But he's at peace now, and out of pain.

We keep going, because we have no real choice.  (Well, we do have a choice, but the choice to not keep going is not one we choose.  We have to honor their memory by keeping it alive as long as we can.)

Well, the roller coaster ride just took a left turn onto a new track.

Or, "oh no, not again."

Or, "here we go again."

Or....

 shit.

My father-in-law passed away 1:00 this morning.  So, let's start the whole grief-train over again.

More to come....
please stand by...

What we really want out of life?

What is it that we really want to do in this world?  I think that many of us feel that it is to leave our mark on the future, in some way or another.  I didn't used to care about anything but the present, but then I finally grew up.  Once I dated a woman who had children, and it didn't work out.  I decided that from then on I would only be interested in women without children, or I would never be "number one" in her life.  So what happened?  Yeah, I fell in love with a woman who had two kids.  And I married her.  Suddenly, I was a parent.  Kind of, they were HER kids, and I was helping her raise them.  (And believe me, they didn't make it easy.)
So, what happens?  Yeah, you guessed it - I actually came to love them as if they had been my biological children, too.  But that was my stumbling block - again, they weren't "my" kids.  As I got older I started feeling like I was leaving nothing to the future.  One reason I got into doing stained glass - any piece I do has a reasonable chance of still being around somewhere in hundreds of years.  So, I was able to leave "something" to the future, but it wasn't really satisfying in that respect.  (I still love doing the work, though - it's fun!)
But a funny thing happened to me, as the kids became adults.  They never let me forget what an important part of their lives I was, how much I meant to them, and I came to realize - I HAD "my" kids all along, I was just too dumb to see it.  So for the past several years, I no longer feel that I'm leaving nothing to the future - I leave two wonderful human beings that carry in them that part of me which makes me what I am.  Not my genes, but my values.  I had my investment in the future returned to me in full.  And more.

And then, completely unexpectedly, I had half of that future taken away from me.  My son, who I struggled with for those many years, was gone.  I've lost part of the future. 
Your kids are your investment in the future.  It may be cliche, but I've come to realize cliches get to be cliche because there's truth behind them.  I finally had a future even after I was gone from this world, and I've lost half of that.  (Daughter, you'd better outlive me.  Us.  Both your mom and I would be totally lost without you.)

Perhaps that's what makes the loss of a child "the most devastating loss of all."  Your children are the future of the world, you want to be part of that through them, this is such a primal need in all of us that it's the driving force behind almost everything we do.  Eating?  Of course, you need energy to raise kids.  Breathe?  C'mon.  Sex?  How else do you have kids?  "Investing in the future" is what we do.  And when we are secure in that we've raised our kids to be the best human beings they can, we can finally relax that primal need.  We've done it.  We did our jobs as human beings.  And then you lose that.  Instantly. 

Lose your parents?  You knew they were going to go before you.
Lose your siblings?  Well, you guys did grow apart as you grew older.
Lose your spouse?  Well, you can always find another.
Lose your child?  Well, uh, er, you've lost your future.

They say those who've lost a child can only really empathize with others who've lost children, but I can't even imagine what it's like to lose your ONLY child.  (The line, "well, you've got another one" is cruel, but there's a grain of truth to it - you still have an investment in the future.  Not true if you've lost your only child - and worse if you're too old to have another.)

And now I'm rambling again.  I'll try to summarize.  I postulate that our most primal urge is to influence the future, we do that through our children.  And that's why the loss of a child is more devastating than any other loss.  Losing a child is like losing the future, and short-circuiting that primal drive.