When The Ice Hit The Floor

Pouring ice around the hot pot of soup to chill it, some pieces escaped and slid across the kitchen floor. Dodging the robust jet-black shepherd pup as she careened around the corner of the kitchen chasing ice cubes, my head snapped up. As those frozen blocks tumbled to the floor, I had a flash back to the baptism this past weekend. A baptism that involved neither ice or dogs.

Trepidation stirred in my heart the week before the baptism and blossomed into full-fledged adrenaline dumping the morning of the event. I wrote it off to it being Mother’s Day weekend and that where the baptism would be held would be the same chapel that held Justin’s coffin for his wake. Those two things alone can scare up a shit storm for a bereaved mother. I debated having a shot of brandy before leaving the house, but that is a step down a slippery slope best avoided.

I was off my mark the rest of the weekend, battled a vicious migraine on Monday, thought the migraine was the reason for the nausea that would not abate. Now on a rainy Thursday night, with the ice cubes that the shepherd did not eat melting all over the kitchen floor, I got it.

Justin died on his way home from a baptism. The last picture we have of him is at a baptism. He was all dressed up in a suit, smiling with joy while holding his godson. He died hours after a baptism. Trapped in a car in water. Water, the gift of life and the agent of destruction. The water that is supposed to bring new life, snuffed out a life. Baptism triggered a massive grief tsunami in me.

The migraine, the nausea, the restlessness, the inability to focus or read, or to complete a task, I had spun back into early grief. The awful feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop, the weight in your chest that makes it impossible to draw a deep breath is only now slithering away. Grief hurts. Child loss physically hurts.

I can’t believe it took me almost a week to make the connection. I believe my subconscious mind has been working through it, I have been awake every night this week in the early pre-dawn hours. Awake with a sense of dread and foreboding. Why ice dropping on the floor broke through to the surface of my brain, I have no clue. But it was a blinding recognition of the baptism being a grief trigger.

Grief triggers are normal. I am not crazy. Triggers flood our body with memories and emotions that take an enormous amount of energy to process. For me, some of my cognitive functions go off-line while I am processing. I am not crazy, I just miss my child. Aching for him, his smile and his laugh, is part of me now, I will never draw a breath without that longing.

And I will always associate baptism with death, not life.