herbavore
Bluelight Crew
You barely come in dreams anymore. How can this be? Maybe because I'm getting old and my brain is on the downhill slide. Already I find myself unable to think of a very common word from time to time. But when you are in a dream now you are always about 10 or 11. There's a mystery.
Grief doesn't stab me the way it used to. Instead it simply resides in me like a very still pool. When i disturb it, like right now writing these words, the tears are right there but it is a melancholy and not an agony.
I'm on a forum for people that have lost children and my heart breaks anew each time a parent writes their first post, knowing the minutes and hours and weeks and years of pain still ahead--how they don't even realize it yet but Absence has just stepped into their lives forever. At first, the presence of their living child is all-consuming but slowly and agonizingly, as I have written about on this thread, even that is dragged away and Absence itself becomes a presence. You can hate it and rail against it or you can cherish it and carry it with you as long as you live. I don't think I chose the latter; rather, it chose me.
I will say this: scent-memory is still strong. I guess it must be the animal part of mothering. I can still conjure your scent as a baby, as a kid, as a teen and young man.
I so wish that I could sit across a table from you and hold your hands in mine while we talked. You could tell me about what became of you once you left your body behind and I could tell you all my petty news from earthly life. Still plugging away down here, hands in the earth, terrified of what's going on one minute and soaking as much as I can up gratefully the next. I've already gotten 3+ times as many years as you got and it still feels short. "Love you, like you, best pal", Smokey.
mom
Grief doesn't stab me the way it used to. Instead it simply resides in me like a very still pool. When i disturb it, like right now writing these words, the tears are right there but it is a melancholy and not an agony.
I'm on a forum for people that have lost children and my heart breaks anew each time a parent writes their first post, knowing the minutes and hours and weeks and years of pain still ahead--how they don't even realize it yet but Absence has just stepped into their lives forever. At first, the presence of their living child is all-consuming but slowly and agonizingly, as I have written about on this thread, even that is dragged away and Absence itself becomes a presence. You can hate it and rail against it or you can cherish it and carry it with you as long as you live. I don't think I chose the latter; rather, it chose me.
I will say this: scent-memory is still strong. I guess it must be the animal part of mothering. I can still conjure your scent as a baby, as a kid, as a teen and young man.
I so wish that I could sit across a table from you and hold your hands in mine while we talked. You could tell me about what became of you once you left your body behind and I could tell you all my petty news from earthly life. Still plugging away down here, hands in the earth, terrified of what's going on one minute and soaking as much as I can up gratefully the next. I've already gotten 3+ times as many years as you got and it still feels short. "Love you, like you, best pal", Smokey.
mom
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