How difficult it is to do simple tasks this week. I had to go to the grocery store and the first thing you see is the huge display of evergreen wreaths to place on graves…no really, it is a very popular item to front outside a store. I went from thinking about celery to thinking of Justin’s grave…and to how Doug and I went last December and placed a wreath on Justin’s grave, there are no words to describe what it is like to stand over that small plot of earth.
I grab a cart, but my mind is still on his grave…when should we get a wreath?.. should we go back to the same Christmas tree farm and get one there?…how early should we go?…it is so much harder this year, it has been so long since we have seen our boy or heard his voice. We miss his gentle care that he had for us. So up and down the aisles I go…trying to stay focused, trying not to cry…and my head starts to pound again, it had finally backed off a little bit from a full blown migraine on Monday. I am slowly learning my migraine triggers, researching cortisol build-up in the system and how it can wreak havoc on our body, what can cause cortisol to linger…I laughed when I read that crying flushes excess cortisol out of your system…but tears are so inconvenient, so noticeable…so messy. And I find people so quick to judge, so quick to offer suggestions, solutions, recommendations and the old stand-by “have you talked to your doctor?”…no, I haven’t…I don’t have a disease…this is what grief looks like, this is what the death of a child feels like. People like us are stark reminders of reality in a society obsessed with denial of death, denial of aging…we make people uncomfortable. If it happened to us, it could happen to them. In our utilitarian society, parents in mourning are under tremendous added stress to continue to perform…not just perform, but excel…I mean, if you can’t produce what good are you. You shake your head perhaps in disagreement, but it is true.
Almost finished shopping, not sure if I have what I need…but I am done, saturation point reached…one more item…pretzels. I am rarely without a bag of pretzels…the salt is good for the low blood pressure and they quiet my nausea…yeah, you miss you child so much and your mind often wanders to how they died, it can make you sick to your stomach…literally. So picking out pretzels and the snack food concessioner who is restocking the shelves asks me how I am doing. I respond “fine”…and try to focus on pretzels…he goes on “oh, you don’t sound like you are in the holiday spirit at all…why so down?”…and I am thinking to myself “you really don’t want to know”….he continues to go on…“Oh, you probably work in retail, don’t you…yeah that can drag you down”…in charity I chirp something about endeavoring to persevere and don’t tell him that I was actually thinking of my son’s grave, that I was thinking that I can’t believe it is Thanksgiving…that how much I miss the phone ringing and having it be Justin to wish us a Happy Thanksgiving. In charity I wish him a Happy Thanksgiving and quickly move off with my pretzels, in charity I don’t say what I would have liked to have said…actually I did not wish to be engaged in conversation at all…I merely wanted pretzels.
So here we go, off to the start of another “season”, a year of “seconds”.
I practice that charity everyday when people ask me how I am. They REALLY don’t want to know what I would say if I were to answer honestly.