August 3, 2024 will be here soon.
This day is about survival.
I mentioned in previous posts how the anniversary of a child's death is a profoundly terrible remembrance. What gives meaning to the day outside of the cataclysmic jolt, the primal wail, keening, and absolute terror of remembering the day your child died?
An incredibly strange thing begins to happen as the days lead up to the death date. You begin to recall, with remarkable clarity, the things you were doing up until that day. Your phone holds the photos of quotidian captures of the everyday, in my case during the global pandemic, these days creep into my present awareness. It is a God-awful element of grief and trauma. There is something very explosive for the heart in knowing when death changed your entire being. When your entire personality shifts from the you of BEFORE and the you that is AFTER.
August 29, 2020. 27 days after my son passed. I'd lost 30 lbs and the only thing I wanted to do was sleep and tend to plants.
Because of the sorrowful depths that grief may take you, one has to maintain some semblance of control. As grievers we know we have no control, but when it comes to the cutting pangs of grief, you can quite literally fall away.
I think of Lisa Marie Presley
I think of Sinead O'Connor
The late singer and humanitarian Sinead O'Connor with her late son, Shane.
This can kill you.
Grief can kill you. And if it does not kill you by putting you six feet deep underground, you can waste away in your sorrow.
So again I say: This day is about survival. And how we kept on in our purpose.
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