When I started this blog in March, 2022, I had the intention of writing weekly, just to get my thoughts out and give them a place to go. But the words didn't come. The thing about writing is that, for me, I can't just sit down and write if the words aren't there. For months and months my broken heart has been so consumed with missing my son that I haven't even been able to find the words to describe the pain. Indescribable. I still don't have the words...but I do have a rambling stream of consciousness that is doing my brain no good so I came back to this blog in some kind of an effort to purge my own brain and make sense of the senseless. I tried grief counseling and it wasn't a good fit for me, mainly because missing my son can't be counseled away. There is nothing here to heal, it is forever broken. You cannot mend a shattered vase, even if you manage to piece it back together it will never be NOT broken, it will never be whole again.
Aiden has been gone now for 16 of the longest months of my life. He has missed two Christmases, two birthdays, almost a school year and a half. He did not turn 16 and get his license and his first car. He did not turn 17. There have been no college visits, no JV football games, no SATs, no first job, no prom. I miss him like my lungs miss air underwater. It is constant, still, all this time later. My heart strings still look for him in a world where he does not exist and it has not gotten any easier. If anything, it has gotten infinitely more difficult to wake up every day and face an entire lifetime left of missing him. There is no greater pain I have ever felt in my life than missing my child. 16 months since I have heard his voice, heard his laugh, seen his smile, felt his hugs. The person who I was before he died...she died too, right along with him. I have lost nearly every friend I had before he died. It is my own fault, I don't recognize myself either, and I wouldn't want to be my friend, that's for sure.
But even amidst all of the pain, life has continued on. I left my job at OverDrive in November and started working remotely as a digital librarian for The New York Public Library with the Open eBooks app. I think Aiden would have been proud of me for taking the leap into something a little scary, and ultimately it's been a good change for me at this stage of life. A year ago, in May 2022, my younger brother, Matt, got out of prison after serving 14 years. I had not seen him in all that time, and was so nervous to try to rebuild a relationship with him. Ava and I stayed with my parents over the summer and got to spend some time with him, and he was doing so well. He had a good job, had gotten promoted, bought a new car. Life was, for the first time ever, so full of promise for the future. Then, suddenly, on the evening of January 21st, he had a massive heart attack at home at my parent's house and died. We had him cremated and celebrated his too short life on Feb. 1st. That was the last day I spoke to my mother. Our family has crumbled under the enormous pressure of trauma, grief, emotions running high...I am honestly not certain we will ever speak again. There's more to the story, of course, there always is, but it isn't worth rehashing in a blog. My brother's last words to me on Christmas Eve were cold and cruel, and maybe I deserved that for failing my own son so profoundly.
This Sunday is Mother's Day. The 2nd since Aiden passed. I wish I could go to sleep on Saturday and just wake up on Monday morning and skip the day altogether. How could I possibly celebrate what an "amazing" mother I am? My only son took his life because he was angry and upset with ME, I had made him feel like a burden to me that night. I will live with the regret of our last conversation for the rest of my life. There is nothing that could ever absolve me from the guilt of how badly I failed him that evening. Leaving him alone in the room, what a terrible foolish mistake. I cannot undo what has been done, I know this. Nothing can bring him back to me. But it doesn't stop me from wishing. It doesn't stop the barrage of what ifs and if onlys a thousand times a day. It doesn't stop the loop playing in my head over and over and over. I wake up most nights in a panic thinking I hear the Man Overboard alarm, my heart pounding. Only to look out my bedroom door across the hallway to his empty room. Empty. Like my heart, my life. Empty.
And still, life goes on. The sun rises and the world spins and I am still here. I am trying with every ounce of try left in me to be a good mom to Ava. My marriage is crumbling at my feet but I don't know if I have the energy or the strength to fix it at the moment. It might already be broken beyond repair. If only Aiden had known the kind of collateral damage that would like in his wake...the aftermath of a nuclear bomb and my heart is the epicenter. The regret that I carry with me weighs so heavy some days that if I don't put it down I fear it will suffocate me, like a sand dune caving in on a hole and I am sitting at the bottom with no way out. In my last post I talked about the physical pain of grief, and I had foolishly believed that it might fade with time, but all that has happened is that the edges have grown sharper and the knife cuts deeper and my heart beats a constant "I miss you...I miss you..." into the void. I scream in my car when I am driving alone, I fill my lungs and shriek as hard and as loud as as a freight train and I beg a God that I don't even believe in to please please please make this not be real. But it is. This is our life now, without Aiden. And I have to find a way to go on living it.
Hopefully it won't be another year+ before I write again, but I don't know. I just don't know. For now I take things hour by hour, day by day. I try to make it through the missed milestones. His senior year this next year is going to gut me, I am not entirely sure how I will make it through but I will, I have to. I would never ever choose to inflict this kind of pain on Chuck and Ava, even as I know that Aiden had no idea what the reality of his choice to leave would be. He didn't know he would cause this kind of devastation. He didn't know, and I forgive him for that. But I have to stay here, in spite of how much I do not want to. I have to find a reason and a purpose for living without him, even though I have no idea how to do that.
The boy that made me a mother died 16 months ago. Mother's Day is dead now too. But I am still here, still breathing, heart still beating, still hurting. Missing him, always. I'll end with some song lyrics from Jackson Browne, one of my favorites. Aiden, I look for you in everything and I'll never stop looking for you.
You're the color of the sky
Reflected in each store-front window pane
You're the whispering and the sighing of my tires in the rain
You're the hidden cost and the thing that's lost
In everything I do
Yeah and I'll never stop looking for you
In the sunlight and the shadows
And the faces on the avenue
That's the way love is
That's the way love is
That's the way love is
Sky, sky blue and black
