I used to look at tombstones in cemeteries and do the math between the dates.
I was most focused on how long this person or that person walked the earth.
I still do that sometimes. But now I do something else as well.
I look to the left and the right to see if the person who ran ahead left parents behind. My eye is drawn to the solitary stones with the same last name next to a double monument clearly honoring a married pair.
Not because I don’t have anything to say but because I can’t find ways to say it that might make sense to anyone else.
So much is jumbled up inside me, so much is wrapped around itself and I can’t find the end of the string to unravel it.
Ever since Dominic ran ahead to Heaven, writing has been my refuge. First in my journals and now in this space.
I depend on words on the page to tell me what I think and feel.
Lately my trusty tool has let me down.
I’m sure part of it is the abrupt end to silent days and virtually unlimited alone time since the coronavirus crisis upended my routine.
Now when I come in from my walk I’m greeted by my husband (a good thing!) instead of only cats. I spend more time making meals and cleaning up after them. I don’t have the quiet moments watching the sun sink down behind the trees and dark reclaim the living room as I peck away at my keyboard.
Dominic was so full of life, it’s impossible to think of him breathless and still.
Part of it is the time of year.
Sunday will be six years since Dominic left us and each passing day brings me closer and closer to that milestone. I should be better at facing it by now.
But I’m not.
Last year my faithful companion animal died around this time too. His death didn’t hold a candle to the death of my son but any death-every death-pricks that deep wound and reminds me the world is not as it should be.
Roosevelt, my faithful companion for over a decade. ❤
Last year’s Facebook post:
2:53 4/7/2019 ••UPDATE•• Roosevelt died in my arms without suffering. I am so thankful for the years I had with him. ❤️.
I’m holding my precious companion animal as he dies. I want him to know that he is loved and the last thing he feels to be my hand on his fur.
So today, breathing is enough.
2:53 April 7, 2019
And this year-well-this year death is the headline everywhere.
Actual death, impending death, anticipated death. Numbers, numbers, numbers that represent real people, real lives, real families left behind.
How my heart hurts!
I try to stay away from too much news, too much social media, too much of anything besides family and close friends.
I’m still up before sunrise and spend time reading, praying, researching, thinking, waiting to hear from my heart.
Dependable routine is one of my most important coping mechanisms.
I like slipping from one familiar chore to the next without thinking.
It keeps my mind busy in an effortless way that leaves little room for random thoughts, little space for grief-inducing memories to sneak in and trip me up.
Change is really not my friend.
Still, change is upon me (and millions of others!) because of this virus. So I’m doing the best I can to cope.
Instead of a house to myself, now my husband is working from home. Instead of quiet mornings alone, conference calls echo off the walls and follow me out open windows to the yard. Instead of before dark breakfast and early lunch with the kitchen closed by noon, I eat early, he eats later, I eat lunch and he eats supper. Kitchen open til eight.
None of those are things I can’t get used to.
After all, I’m blessed he’s here, has a job and we have not only enough to eat but a wide variety . I like cooking and love finding creative uses for leftovers.
What no one but me knows about all the change is this: I’m walking places I tend not to go-in the house, in the yard, down our paths-and every place I set my foot holds memories I’ve been avoiding.
When we moved an old pen a couple weeks ago for new chickens we found a rusty chain attached to its base. While my husband and son were digging it out to use again I was transported to the day Dominic moved the pen years ago with the tractor. It was just me and him and he was a little perturbed with me that I needed it moved. I saw him in my mind’s eye plain as day on the tractor. I could hear his baritone voice above the trusty thrum of the engine and picture him hopping down from the seat, unhooking the chain and driving off to park the tractor.
It was a flash. Here and gone in an instant. But the rest of the day I suffered from a grief hangover that I just couldn’t shake.
These are challenging days.
So much of the routine I depend on to guide me through has been shredded. So many of the habits I’ve developed over years are unavailable right now.
There will be plenty of frustrating moments, plenty of fearful moments and plenty of just plain ordinary moments during this unprecedented worldwide season of slowing down.
But there can be beautiful moments too. There are hidden blessings in this forced family togetherness.
Practice finding them, practice making them, practice wrapping them up in love and grace.
If you’ve been waiting for an excuse to get the best plates down from the top shelf I’d say today’s the day!
Make some memories.
❤ Melanie
I have never been a crystal and china kind of gal.
I got a few special pieces when my husband and I married, but most of the things in my home are durable and useful.
So I don’t have many things tucked away for special occasions.
I’m glad that when my kids were young we made even ordinary days special.
I’ve written before that I am oh, so thankful I had NO IDEA Dominic would leave us that early April morning in 2014.
It would have cast an awful shadow over all those years we were blessed with his presence.
But there are some things I wish I’d known.
I wish I had known how hard it is to conjure up his voice now that it’s been nearly six years since I heard it.
I would have taken more short videos, just to have his laugh, his sarcasm, his deep mellow “Hey!” handy on my phone for the moments when I long to hear it. I wouldn’t have erased the backlog of recorded messages on the landline just one day earlier.
I wish I had known there were so few photographs of us together.
I would have gotten over myself much sooner and stuck my fat bottom in every shot my family begged me to take. I would have made certain there was at least one of him and me on each birthday, at special occasions and when he graduated high school and college. I was always the one taking them, organizing something or just to self-conscious to be in the picture.
I wish I had saved more cards, notes and random bits of flotsam from over the years with his words, his handwriting, his childish drawings.
Just a month before he left us, I cleaned out two decades of home schooling records and carelessly tossed so many bits of him into the bed of my truck, hauling it to the dump. Back then it felt like I was unburdening myself of too much paper and too many frivolous memories. Now it feels like an incalculable loss.
I would have listened more often to the wonderful sound of his drums banging away upstairs.
I took a walk most afternoons and Dominic timed his practice for when I was out of the house because it was so very loud. It was considerate and kind. And I DID get to hear him through the windows as I made my rounds but I really, really wish I’d just stopped and fully appreciated his talent.
I could list so many more ways I’d have arranged life differently-if I had KNOWN.
But I didn’t.
So I make my way through another spring, remembering, remembering, remembering.
A year ago I was in the same city under very different circumstances.
My first grandson had been born at just over 28 weeks because his mama developed HELLP syndrome and was in mortal danger. Both he and she were in the hospital while we held our collective breath, begging for them to be OK.
We were filled with quiet but uneasy joy knowing as we do how death can come to steal it away.
This Sunday, family and friends gathered to watch this little guy grab his first birthday cake with gusto and smear his mama and daddy with blue icing.
You’d never know he got such a tentative start in life just by looking at him.
Grateful is too small a word for how we feel.
Melanie ❤
THIS YEAR:
LAST year:
Last week was a roller coaster.
My first grandchild-a boy-was born prematurely on Saturday after several days of heart stopping, breath robbing drama as his mama went back and forth to the hospital three times in as many days.
My son, his father, is deployed overseas and paddling as fast as he can to get home.
Oh, the early days, weeks and even years of grief!
I was a giant walking nerve.
Every sight, sound, smell or even touch that reminded me of Dominic evoked a wave of sorrow that almost always ended in tears.
I cried in the grocery store, walking past Bath and Body Works in the mall, driving down the road when certain songs came on the radio, tidying up drawers and finding a long lost and forgotten something that Dominic tucked away for later.
Sometimes I just wanted to scream, “Don’t you know my son’s not here??!!”
But of course I couldn’t do that and walk around in society.
So the triggers were an outlet for that pent up energy, angst and sadness.
It was awful.
Especially when what I set out to do was something I really needed to do. I’d leave the house with a list of places to go, things to buy and people to see but often return having done only a fraction of it.
I’m better at it now.
I’ve grown stronger and am more skilled at carrying the burden of the disconnect between my heart and other hearts who haven’t experienced deep pain and loss.
I’ve learned how to fix my eyes on some distant point if cornered by a well-meaning friend asking how I am but not really wanting to hear about how Dominic’s death continues to impact our family.
I press my fingers together hard in an attempt to stop the sorrow rising up and threatening to undo me until I can escape to the bathroom, a quiet corner or my car.
And I’ve learned not to be ashamed of the tears that fill my eyes and slip down my cheek despite all my best efforts no matter where I am.
It’s been five plus years since Dominic ran ahead to Heaven.
And while I’ve grown stronger and better able to carry the load of grief, the missing never ends.
I cannot become accustomed to photos that don’t include one of my children. I can’t set aside the sense that someone is absent from the table. It still seems unreal and unnatural for there not to be presents under the tree with Dom’s name on them. It is absolutely impossible for me to tick off the current ages of my kids without a pause for the age Dominic should be, but isn’t.
Now missing Dominic on one side of life is bookended by missing my mama on the other.
Sure, it’s perfectly natural and orderly for our parents to leave this life before us.
But it isn’t painless.
As a matter of fact, it is very, very painful.
I miss the generational space between me and eternity. I miss Mama’s voice, her silly stories, her peculiar habits and stubborn nature. I miss seeing her in the chair that was her daily perch these past two years. I miss the way she piddled with her food always declaring, “I eat everything on my plate” when she knew good and well she didn’t.
My mama, Patty Hart, and me as a baby.
Our circle is smaller this year.
When we gather for opening presents and enjoying the Christmas feast there will be two people absent.
My heart will always mark the space where Mama and Dominic SHOULD be.
