The Inevitable March to April

Well...it's almost March.  Then April.  Fricking April.  I am so looking forward to being done with nursing school, but every year at this time, I start to feel...just bad.  I can't even really explain in any concrete way how bad it is.  I miss my little boy.  I don't want to add another year to the tally of years that he has been gone.  I can't stop my mind and my heart from seeing things as they might have been.  Seeing my daughter not growing up with the ghost of a big brother but with a real live big brother who teases her and plays with her and plots against the Mom-and-Dad-Regime with her.  Seeing Jerry and I as we once were--people who said things like "Everything will be ok" and actually believed what they were saying.  I don't know how I can walk around like a regular person.  I don't know how every person I meet can't see how wounded I am.  How completely shredded my insides are.  This April, he would be six years old.  It hurts to even type that.  On bad days, grief turns into this overbearing monster that systematically strips everything from me.  Takes it all.  On bad days, I live in fear.  Had a couple of bad days lately. 

April is a potent month.  It contains both the birth of my son and his death fifteen days later.  His birthday...oh how I wish it was a joyful day.  I wish I could look back on it and say, "That was such a perfect day, the day he was born."  Instead it was like the three of us were ejected into this vortex of sheer chaos.  Chaos that swallowed us whole and spun us around until we couldn't see which way was out, and then spit us out in the middle of nowhere.  I look back on those days with him, and I can see him.  Just him, without all the tubing and machines.  But I can't feel just joy.  There is so much mixed in with it that it is never as simple as looking back and remembering a sweet moment. When people see Matthew's pictures, almost inevitably the first comment they make is about the tubes and wires and machines surrounding him.  I never see the tubes and wires.  I wish I could do that with my memories.  See through the bullshit and the painful things so that I could just see joy.  It has been 6 years.  And I have never completely gotten used to it.  I honestly don't think I ever will.  I don't think there will ever be a day when I feel like it's an old wound that doesn't really hurt anymore.  Apparently I've been laboring on all this time under false pretenses.  I mean, when I lost him I thought it would get better.  I would've thought that six years later, it would at least be reduced to a dull throb.  But my grief is still so sharp that sometimes I stop and examine it in sheer awe and disbelief.  

I actually logged on intending to talk about something completely different.  And this is what came out...whatever I guess.