You Learn

As I look around the house and yard pondering where to begin the final clean up and what can be packed away now and what needs to wait I think about how alone I am. Two sets of hands are always better than one and the amount of chaos around me, under me, above me and in the sheds outside is overwhelming to say the least. I am also realizing just how much pain I am actually in. My body aches deep into its core causing moans of pain, shudders as my body reacts to the pain and goose-bumps as I am completely overwhelmed by it all. 

It’s been a few days since I wrote that first paragraph, nothing has changed though. I squared away some paperwork and got some things, like my coupons, organized. I am still being the professional procrastinator that I have grown to be. I have dreams of grandeur and no money or means to do any of it. I do feel like I am heading in the right direction by stepping backwards for now. Hopefully, I will be married soon and I can get back to the life I have always dreamed about and wanted. 

Simplicity. Is that really too much to ask for?

They finally placed a headstone on my grandma’s grave. I haven’t gone to see it yet but when I drive by and see it I feel nothing at all. No desire to pull in and take a peek. I feel worse that I don’t care then I do about her being gone. I still feel when I go to visit my cousin Todd that she is watching me and judging me and hating me the way she did when she was alive. I wish she wasn’t buried so close to him because I now feel like our private talks aren’t so private, like she is listening, watching and judging my every thought. 

Sometimes I wonder why I am so dead inside about certain things or people and other times I am crying about something completely ridiculous or that has nothing to do with me. I think the loss of a child is the hardest thing and because I empathize with that I am hurt the most by it. It is so easy to bawl my eyes out to a soap opera because someone lost their baby because I can relate to that feeling, even though they are acting.

I am in emotional turmoil most days of the year because I am thinking of my angels and where they are at and how I am not there. I know they are in a better place than earth but it brings little healing to the hole in my heart where each of them should reside. I tend to believe that people who had the opportunity to meet their children before the child left the physical realm shouldn’t feel so much devastation because they had those moments, those memories that I never got. I know that’s not a fair or rational way of thinking though. I know that loss is loss and it hurts no matter the stage of life. I am envious that I don’t know what my children looked like, what color their eyes were, their hair, and the sound of their giggles. I have no pictures to reflect back on and nowhere to go when I need to mourn.

Is it any easier to have those things? I reckon it isn’t. I reckon that driving by a cemetery every day and knowing your child is six feet under rotting and being consumed by bugs is just as hard as it is for me to have nothing. I would like to think that these parents, these mothers, remember their children in a better light, in the smiles, giggles, and cry’s and pictures. The images emblazoned into their mind for all of time.

I know deep down we are both haunted in different ways. I also know that the guilt and anguish is the exact same. Pain is pain, the cause or thoughts behind it are fairly irrelevant. I see mothers who have lost their children in the last couple of years and how broken they are, how their soul went with their child and I can empathize, I can understand how easy it is to quit caring and go through the motions of life with absolutely no clue or care about anything around you except for the fact that you are in pain.

“Experience is a brutal teacher, but you learn. My God, do you learn.” –C.S. Lewis