I look back at what i wrote this time a year ago and it seems like a macabre joke.
“And as for me and Max; Max says he has no regrets about leaving work and enjoys our life and his new job. I enjoy not doing it 🙂 We’re happily married again and both looking forward to having a new little person in our life. I didn’t really think it could all turn out this well and i am so very grateful it has.
Touch wood.”
I can’t bear this year to end. I don’t want to leave my little boy behind. I don’t want to live in a year he will never be in. I don’t want to say goodbye. I want to rip apart the air until I find him and somehow put the pieces of this shattered life back together. It isn’t right that my 12 year old is begging 2011 to be kinder than 2010 was, or that my 6 year old can be overheard saying “I hope next year is better – but we probably won’t get another baby.” It isn’t right that I held my child till his heart stopped and his breath stopped.
Today there has hardly been 5 minutes free of tears; I steeled myself for Christmas and forgot to take care of today. My little boy, our boy, our son and our brother and our little future joy is all gone and I can’t do the magic to bring him back. No kisses or skin to skin time or love or admonishment would keep him here and I can’t get him back.
I couldn’t make it better. And I still can’t. And I can’t see how there will be a happy new year ever again.
Oh Freddie please, please come back.
Lots of love and hugs. Thinking of you all xxx
Thinking of you all *hugs*
I think about you all every day and just hope each time I
read your entries time seems to make life more bearable. My heart
goes out to you all. I’ve not had your experiences, but my mum has,
losing her first born baby boy at a month old in 1963,time was so
different then and to cut a long story short because of her age and
the thinking of the time Peter was buried by the hospital and he
was never mentioned again. She obviously has suffered over the
years and my sister and I only knew of his existance when we were
adults. Im pleased to say after lots of therapy for my mum and me,
she is able to freely talk about him, I realise you can grieve and
at the same time love others so deeply without the exclusion of one
or the other. After many years of searching for his grave we found
it this year and at last have somewhere physical to connect to him.
I love how you have shared everything with your children and how
you can connect with each other to keep his memory alive at all
times in your hearts. Wishing you all some kind of peace in 2011.
Regards Sharon
Oh Merry. I wish I had something to say other than I am so very sorry and I wish that your Freddie could come back. Love Catherine xo
Wishing he was back with you too. Sending so much love. x
Hello Merry.
I’ve seen your postings over the years on various HE sites. I was unaware until just two days ago that you had lost a child – I’ve been a little out of the loop having lost my own 17-year-old son in 2009. He was run over when crossing the road – he died instantly.
I can so easily identify with your feelings about New Year’s Eve. A year ago, I spent midnight alone in my sister’s bathroom wanting to stab myself so I could join my boy. But, as I have no belief in any kind of afterlife, I knew all I would succeed in doing was killing myself and that would involve abandoning two other children who had already lost their brother – and I wouldn’t get to see him anyway.
And all the while, others partied downstairs. And I wanted to scream at the injustice of it all. And I wanted to smash up the whole world.
Last night, I spent the evening with another HEr. There was no party – just me and her chatting about our children, our work, our families, home ed, EO, and the meaning of life – and death. Our daughters watched a DVD together and then they, and her hubby, joined us to watch the fireworks on TV at midnight. It was OK. I felt relaxed – and relieved.
Today, as I replay the events of the last 19 months, I’m sad again. I think I’ll take one of my (very rare) drives to his grave. I feel so impotent when I go there – there’s nothing to do but look at a patch of ground. And when you’ve spent time caring for them, loving them, and investing in their future, looking at a patch of ground is no substitute for what was.
I wish you all the strength in the World for you on your journey Merry – I’m hardly much further ahead but I remember only too well the agony of each milestone the first time I passed it. In some ways this year, they’re easier yet harder as the World seems to think that I should be recovering and ‘getting over it’ by now.
I’ll bethinking of you and will pop in from time to time if that’s OK.
Beverley
I read this on mamapundit & thought instantly of you
‘Today is the last day of the last year that my child will have ever been alive.
For some reason, this milestone seems particularly cruel and unforgiving. It’s like another sort of goodbye that I have to make.
But I don’t have a choice. Time keeps dragging me farther and farther away from my son, from the reality of his existence. I can kick and scream and beg, but time shows no mercy.’
It’s too cruel and I’m sorry and saying that a billion times over won’t change anything. I want 2011 to bring you hope.
Layla, yes, just exactly that very sentiment. Yesterday was the worst day since he died I think.
Beverley, I am so sorry, that is just my worst remaining nightmare. I have no idea what to say except thank you for the hope.
And everyone else – thank you – sometimes the words in this comment box are what get me to tomorrow.
My own experience of loss and Death (a very small baby and a father) to me felt like a sci fi bodysnatcher, something that stealed in and stole. The brain does not compute the loss, I thought it would. I thought that some time would go by and I would ‘get it’? But the years don’t make it any easier, the grieving didn’t get any less, it just came each day like the tide and I have to just see what is washed up with it. Sometimes I say out loud: “Okay, the jokes up, you can come out now!” thinking death was just some sort of joke.
Death doesn’t make sense, ultimately nothing helped it make sense, not religion or support or faith, nothing has cured the rolling grief, except that some days are easier than others, laughs are even managed, and others still hit like a freight train and one is left looking into one’s own grave, being forced to carry on for everybody else. We are hard wired to yearn for our loved ones, hard wired to howl at the moon in absolute inconsolable grief when our loved ones are torn from us, and if our loved ones are gone that doesn’t mean we can carry on as if they didn’t matter.
Freddie matters very much.
I hope, Merry, I really hope, that in your days you have enough of easier times of grief to carry you through the times when it is definitely not going to be easy.
I’ve read your post and I’ve read your comments and, as your title says, I don’t have the words. Your other commenters have left words of love and compassion. I can only echo them and say how much I wish your son, your beautiful, precious, important Freddie was with you.
My mood seems to mimic yours.. I just wish so much was different…
Merry, I wish I had something more useful to write, but I
just wanted to say I hope 2011 will be kinder to all of you. Time
is a great healer but it’s also cruel – marching on regardless when
we are wishing with all of our hearts for it to stop, for us not to
leave people behind. Wishing you the very best for 2011 Sally
x
Yes, it’s just not right. At all. So unfair and so hard and so just not right. xx