For Thor - 66 - Kayak

People keep asking me what I want to do for my birthday and I can't answer them. I feel myself withdraw from the question as my awareness turns inward looking for something that sounds fun or festive or celebratory. The fact is, none of those things are how I feel right now. Celebrating is not in the cards. I don't want to celebrate the fact that I've lived another year, through the most painful experience a mother can endure. Singing and candles and cake and gifts for me seem so incongruent with the deep sorrow that is prevalent in my heart.

What do I want for my birthday? I want you back. I don't want to have to keep living with this horrible burden. I am tired, Thor. I am tired of trying to rise above it and look for the silver lining and always staking out some ground to stand on to declare "I'm doing better today." It's exhausting because I always fall back. One step forward three steps back and maybe one or two off to the side.

What do I want for my birthday? I want to run and run and run and run until I outrun this fucking pain. I want to stop crying all the damned time because my broken heart bleeds out of my eyes in salty tears. I want to see your face again and hear your voice. I want to worry about you and fuss at you for making the brash decisions of the young. I want to dance with you in the kitchen and eat a pile of nachos while cheering on the Broncos.

What do I want for my birthday? I want for your dad and me to be able to love, live and talk again without this vast gulf of grief between us. I want for your brothers to live free without the specter of your death hanging over them. I want to smile from my heart and through me eyes again; not being blinded by tears and choked with unspoken sorrow.

I know, I know. I want a lot. But that's nothing new.

I look at the road ahead of me, still strewn with the rubble and in ruins from your death. It makes me tired to think that this is never going away, that I'll have to figure out how to live with a hole blown in my soul, heart, and life. How do I continue to pick up the pieces and arrange them anew when the wreck is so devastating? Nothing is the same, all my relationships and understanding is different because I am completely altered.

Aunt Radha told me she was more concerned about me around my birthday than on yours. I had thought that to be odd, but I accepted it since she seems to have a good handle on this grieving thing. And holy smokes, your birthday was so difficult for me. I felt like a fly-stung horse inside of myself, unable to settle into any solace or comfort for very long before the sting of loss had me in tears, again. And that agitated agony has only ratcheted up in the days since. Four milestones in a row with little to no time to process in between has me on the ropes and bleeding today, and we're still two days away from "My Birthday" I just want to hide. In a hole. For like, a million years. I wonder if that would be enough time to feel "better"?

Nana must have sensed a tremor in the force because she called yesterday to tell me she is free on my birthday to be with me, whatever I want to do or don't want to do…or whatever. We attempted to make some plans for the family to come together, but they dried up like dust when I consider doing any of it. How can we celebrate me and life when you are dead? It feels so inadequate or unimportant or even wrong to light candles and sing when I am at the very bottom of the well of grief where there is no air, only sorrow.

I am grateful for the lifelines that tether me to the sweetness of gratitude and divine grace. I can feel how I feel without the fear of being stuck here forever. Sometimes this well is more like a raging sea, and I am swamped, sinking to the bottom where there is still something to be learned in this airless, sorrowful place. So I cry and scream and want to outrun the pain, but I know that it's pointless. No matter where I go or what I do in this life, there will be one agonizing fact; you died, and nothing is the same. I don't know where I am going or what the new landscape will hold. The certainty of walking with the weight of grief is so tiring that I just want to curl up in a ball and sleep for a long, long time. The uncertainty of what my life will look like in the days, months and years to come is equally draining. The only way for me is forward, through the rubble that cuts my feet. You can follow a trail of bloody footprints through my heart from where I had to wake up on that first horrible morning with the ugly reality that you are gone, to now, nine and a half months later and that same ugly truth is still staring me down.

What do I want for my birthday? Resilience. Joy. Peace. Solace. Comfort. Love. These don't come easy, and we can't buy them at Amazon Prime. They take work, cultivation, practice and patience. It takes mindfulness to monitor my thoughts and emotions so I can recognize and release them. The key is to allow for their full expression, with compassion and self-love. So that is where I am…in the bottom of the well, feeling heartbroken and exhausted. I am experiencing these things from the space of Trust and Love, which is a safe space for me to just BE SAD, which is the emotion that arises today.

What do I want for my birthday? Dad said he'd like to get me a kayak so I can be on the water. Being near the water, I can more readily experience Joy, Peace, Solace and Comfort. I feel Love more freely when I am in nature and being near the water is like sitting next to a huge generator of emotional healing. Your dad and brothers and I could go out together and have some fun fishing and paddling across the rippling waves.

Hmmm. He might be onto something there. Ok. A kayak. I'd like a kayak for my birthday.

We'll see you on the water, Bubby.

I love you,
Mom