Every year that passes by from the day we met, it becomes more and more difficult to grasp the idea that you were real, Luke. The fraction of my life that we spent together now feels so tiny, 14 years later.
Miniscule, really. 39 weeks, of my now 47 years on this earth was all we got together. It's still not fair.
Today was the first time in the past 14 years that I ended up at St. Jude on your birthday. Today, it was for a preventative MRI breast cancer screening...because apparently I triggered some cut score on a breast cancer likelihood screener that puts me onto a high-risk list.
I wish I'd gotten some of that preventative screening before you died. Really. It worked with the girls. I know it works. I still feel robbed of that too.
I also got an Ativan today, because that breast cancer MRI is no friggin joke and the last time I did it, I had a mild panic attack, not unlike the one I had during your delivery. There was no way I was gonna make it through that (today of all days), without it, so that was a relief.
All that to say...somehow, I'm still surviving. I will always wish you did. But I'm doing my best to keep going, to keep living for all of the life you never got to have. The world feels so brutal right now, and I struggled today to separate my sadness for you and the general grief I'm currently holding for the world right now. I don't know what the future holds. How naive was I to believe I knew what it held for us on September 8, 2012? I suppose that's one of life's greatest lessons, one that maybe stings the most after you become a parent. We have no way of seeing what tomorrow brings. We're all just doing the best we can--With who and what we've got left. I was listening to a mom interviewed about her son who died on September 11 in the Twin Towers...She said she went to bed that night before feeling nothing but happiness--Filled and complete. And then she woke up the next morning, and it was all gone and her life would never be the same again.
If you make it to adulthood without having to live through that kind of morning, you're probably lucky, I guess.
We should have a 14 year old tonight. Who would you be this year? You could've been so many things. And we just never get to know.
For me? You're rainbows and rays of light that jut through dark clouds in blinding bursts. You're the feeling of summer turning, slowly, to Fall. The way the air changes with the light in Septembers. You're 14 years of wishing things were different and knowing they can't be. You're 14 years of one-foot-in-front-of-the-othering, building the life we always wanted, but without you. Surviving the hardest thing I've ever had to do.
Still looking for you though, always, as a Mom does. Happy #14, sweet boy.
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