Hold the Confetti

Here it is, another year.  I had to stay off social media on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day.  The jubilant outcries were just so foreign.  I couldn't join in without feeling like a liar or the worst sort of fake.

This new year?  I can survive. I think I've got that part worked out.  But, I am terrified...terrified...of her becoming smaller in the frame of my future.  All the new stuff crowds her.

As time marches forward, and these years just fan out, one after another, effortlessly, it would seem, although trudging through them is excruciating, the gulf between us seems to get larger and larger.  I live in fear of the day she will have been dead longer than she was alive, as if the tipping of that scale will negate her very existence (and it's only fifteen years away, if I live that long!)   Is that irrational?  Maybe, but it doesn't feel that way.

Rationally, I suppose, she will never be any farther from me than the day her heart stopped beating.  That was the moment the world stopped for me and never rightly began again.  Sure it moves, but everyone marches along in line so fast, and I seem to shuffle along, never going fast enough or jauntily enough to suit those around me, most of whom have been lucky enough to not have their pace disturbed in quite the same way.

Here's the thing:  each day that goes by, there are moments where she should be, but isn't.  And yes, it's the right thing to make new memories with my remaining child and my family members, but it's scary as all hell, too.  They pile up, the new songs and the new movies, the books and the world events, and if  I wrote them all down, ripped them out of my journal, and laid them at my feet, eventually I wouldn't be able to see the ground for all that paper piled up around me, let alone be able to remember with crystal clear accuracy the time before all of it happened, when she filled my world, when her voice was one I heard every day and her face one I saw every night before I went to sleep.

I want that recollection to remain intact.   I need it.

I'm supposed to feel proud of all the new stuff I did this holiday season, right?  After all,  I did put up the tree and baked the cookies and cooked a couple of  holiday dishes.  I went to Christmas Eve and Christmas day without any meds.
 But it's not over.  It'll never be over.  There is no fucking finish line.  I check off all my neat little boxes and then the blasted thing just starts all over again.  This grief thing is a sorry ass business.  And I'm not as progressive as I might lead you to believe.

See, I still haven't taken her coats off the coat rack in the entry way by the back door. It's going on five years now.   I thought about about it awhile back for a split second and felt like such a traitor I could barely live with myself.  So I left them right where they hung.
 But let's be realistic, she doesn't need those coats to be there... I do.

Because in the light of all this lovely progress that has everyone so pleased with me, there will be the moments that still bend my knees when I think of her in any small fashion...the line of a song, something on tv, a conversation...and there will come, most likely, another moment like the one last night, when it was raining and I got up to put the dog out, during which I broke out sobbing as I opened the back door, for no other reason than my child is dead and it is almost too much to bear.  I shut the back door, still crying, and turned to her coats, hugged them and tried to smell them- futile since her scent has long since departed them- but it didn't stop me from trying...trying so hard to recreate that feeling of having her precious body in my arms.  After I'd let go and stepped back, I searched her pockets, hoping to find a note in her handwriting that I'd missed by not being brave enough to look before, but finding candy wrappers instead, which I nevertheless cried over considerably.  If that doesn't say desperation, I don't know what does.

It's almost too much to bear.  Yet I am bearing it.  The pain is so great sometimes I think I will die but then I realize I may not and that's even worse.  It's a stretch of hell, not a happy new year, all masks aside and truth be told.  Of course, I'll keep going for her little brother but I'll pass on the streamers and party blowers, thanks all the same.

Logically, I should put the coats away.  But grief isn't logical at all.
Logically, she doesn't get any further away with the more time that passes, but it sure feels that way.
It sure does.