Walking

Tomorrow is our Walk to Remember. Due to Canadian Thanksgiving and conflicting commitments from most members in our support group, the date is early. I am not doing anything special this year, just attending.

In the past I have sang, spoke, read poetry. Is it okay that I am not doing any of that this year? I know the answer is "yes". I know it's okay. But it feels wrong.

I am not in the place any more where I grasp at anything that is remotely connected to C. It saddens me, but it is what they call healing. I have done as much as I can to integrate him (and the loss of him) into my life. Tomorrow I will walk in his memory for the fifth time.

Every day, BB grows and changes. His existence is a continual evolution. I worry about being a good parent, about making good choices for him. I am constantly reacting to those every day things that define our life.

My relationship with C. never changes. It does not grow and mature. He cannot reach out to me as his mother, I cannot hold him close as my son. In so many ways, he can only be an idea, a concept. He was and he mattered, but I didn't know him. Not in the way I know BB. I know that is the real tragedy, but I can't change it. And I have lived with it long enough to know that it isn't going to change.

I think of C. at some point in every day. Not in that gut-wrenching absence-of-presence sort of way, but when I see two brothers play together or when someone speaks of their kids. I know, intellectually, that I have another son. But I don't know what life was like with that son. In some ways, I just don't know what I am missing and I never will.

I don't accept my son's death, not in some "it was meant to be" sort of way. But I have integrated it into my life. I had a son who died. I son I barely knew. I never heard his voice, he never reached out to me, I never fed him, he never slept on my chest. Those personal, physical, tangible pieces of evidence to label him "my son" left with him. We never get that relationship.

There's nothing to be done about it. It doesn't make me weep. It is the tragedy of my life, yet I am finished with most of my crying. I am not putting him away, never will, but the shroud of continual grief is gone.

I miss my son. I never had my son. My son is a memory of a beautiful dream from another lifetime.

Tomorrow I will walk in memory for my son.