May 11, 2016: What to do
It’s been two years… it’s only been two years… Oh, what the mind ponders when dealing with grief post-year one and now marking the end of year two. Different? Yes. Less painful? No. Resigned? Maybe.
The beautiful boy embedded in my heart is still there. In the outside world, he is now safe from all harm. In reflection, I see the power of light from my broken heart but it is dim in the darkest of places we walk with ourselves alone. People exclaim, “I don’t know how you do it.”, “I couldn’t be as strong as you.” No one told me I had a choice… to walk on Earth with the joy that my son, Nick, brings to my life, or to pass on to Heaven and be reunited with my son, Sam, who died on Mothers’ Day 2014 from unknowingly taking a synthetic drug. I didn’t know I had a choice because I don’t. We mourned Sam this Mothers’ Day, the day he died and again we mourned him this May 11, the actual date he died. Whether a holiday or a date on the calendar, we are always in mourning, even now; even behind what we do, be it bowling, golf, etc.
This anniversary I managed myself enough not to melt down in public… not to hurt those I love by revealing the most complicated grief in my soul. It’s there. It does no one good on display; not even me, but it is who I am now. Everything in my life has changed in two years. Losing Sam; losing sense of family. Experiencing God’s grace and mercy through loving thoughts, prayers and acts of kindness so many time over to sustain me during a long time for which I could not make it on my own any given day. Starting graduate school in clinical mental health counseling with wonderful, kind souls that speak to me in such positive and loving ways whether they say something or not. Moving from the family home that I couldn’t care less whether I lived in before Sam died, then couldn’t imagine ever leaving, to having to leave to be able to breathe. Leaving a healthcare business career I cultivated over a decade and starting a new career in order to save myself, by helping others in a way that also helps heal me. That’s what’s different.
I still think about him night and day. Not with precious memories that bring a smile to my face but by reliving memories that were to have happy endings that no longer will. I don’t love Sam less; I love him more. No, it’s not less painful.
Today as I realized where I am in making a difference in this world with my pain, it is because of Sam living, not because of Sam dying. There is no rest because this current life was not what was to be. But it is. #muchlovetosam