Your mother for the baby she never cradled, the life that grew inside her all those long, difficult months fled before you took your first breath. For her hopes, her dreams, her plans, all the things you were for her gone in a bitterness that she still carries within her heart.
For me it was today.
This today. Today the morning after your birthday, when I would have given you the keys to the old beater Honda, with stern warnings about driving with boys who had been drinking and parking with boy who hadn't.
This today, where we early risers would have shared silent coffee in a darkened house, your hair a tousled halo about your face.
All the todays that we never had; the fights and the cuddles and the excitement and the tears. The skinned toes and the algebra tests and the silly laughs and the midnight fears.
Slowly the pain and the loss has diminished, as your tiny spark of life fades with the years.
Today I can write this without crying. Today I can think of you as just a loss, a grief, the greatest of many, instead of a ragged hole in my chest where this day ripped out my beating heart and held it before my face to taunt me with the brutal randomness of life and death.
Today I miss you with a wet-eyed sadness instead of a huge, remorseless, tearing grief.
But.
That grief is still there, my dear.
That hole where you should be, young and strong and tall and alive, is still in my heart and will be until it runs slowly down and stops beating. The way yours did, this day seventeen years ago.
Goodbye again, my very dear. Goodbye.
Yes. I'll be here again next year.
I'll make the coffee; rich as joy, dark as night, and strong as love.
And I'll sit and sip and wait for you to come. And we'll sit and be silent together, until you have to leave again.
Bryn Rose Gellar.
March 1, 2002-March 2 2002
1 comment:
Every year, Chief.
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