love you, miss you, bye
Damn it hurts today. It starts in your stomach, clinches your chest, then goes down your arms in legs. My body revulses at the intensity of grief some days. But I don’t cry. I think I’m either conditioned that way, or afraid if I started I wouldn’t stop. There have been days when I couldn’t contain the scream. Not crying hard-screaming bloody murder. The grief causes physical pain. Ian lived in my body, and my body knows he’s missing.
It’s true that it’s the little things you miss. I don’t think about Disney trips or the shiny moments captured in Christmas cards. I miss him saying I love you (whether it was with his little toddler voice or when he couldn’t talk, laughing when I would pick him up). I miss him singing to his online classes. Or him throwing a fit because he didn’t want to do something. You never realize that those kicking and screaming temper tantrums would become such precious memories. You don’t realize that every little blonde boy you see would turn into your son, and the crushing reality of what could have been will almost knock you to the floor in the middle of Walmart.
Everything. Is. A. Trigger. I have to fight through flashbacks (and the subsequent anxiety attack) all day every day. I can’t watch a medical show, hear an ambulance or helicopter, watch Mickey Mouse clubhouse…it all comes back to him. I am reminded everyday of the moment they called his death, the time I was driving and saw him go by in an ambulance, the phone call I got that he drowned while I was at Target. I don’t want to wear certain clothes because they were my “hospital clothes” (“fancy” loungewear, so I could be comfortable and presentable. Side note-I always wanted to look presentable at the hospital because I wanted the doctors to listen to me and not think I was some scumbag mom). My baby plays with Ian’s old toys. Ian couldn’t really play with them. You wouldn’t believe how many emergency vehicles are out there, just waiting to send me right to the physiological place where my son was going to the hospital-adrenaline rushing, terror, love. Obviously the drowning and death are traumatic, but so was every hospital stay. Most people bring their kids once or twice in their life-and that was super scary right? Well, I can’t even tell you the amount of times we were there, and almost every time was life or death. Pneumonia, blood clots, seizures, infection, even the flu could be deadly. If you’ve gone through one serious hospital stay, you know it stays with you for awhile. When you are so worried about your child you can barely blink. That happened to us all the time. And we worked, took care of our other kids, acted like people. My husband and I would swap work days, and would have to work through the day while our son wasn’t stable. Can you imagine doing that?
I’ve had to turn into a person that can handle the brutal destruction of life. A person that can breathe through being traumatized (literally and figuratively) everyday. So when you see me smiling, I’m always reliving trauma. It doesn’t mean I can’t be happy, but there is constant pain. However, I can accept my pain, because that pain means I loved. It wouldn’t hurt if I didn’t care. If I didn’t invest so much energy into Ian having a good life, I wouldn’t be so lost without the things I did for him.
I love you so much, I miss you so much. Goodbye my beautiful boy.