White Knuckling It

Two years.      730 days.    17520 hours.

These anniversaries become glass half full sorts of events.  Ok, truthfully grief is an honest look at the empty glass with feeble attempts at seeing it half full.  

Two years of head spinning, life changing events.  Freeing and overwhelming all at the same time. 

Two years of grasping at hope, holding on to faith and surreptitiously drinking in the love that surrounds me.

What's difficult about anniversaries like this is feeling in step, in sync with the last hours you had on this earth.  In these moments I can feel you close.  I sit looking up the stairs you walked up just minutes before you collapsed and see in you my minds eye as if it happened only moments before.  I wonder if I quickly walk over if I will see your footprints imprinted on the carpet.

In these final hours I open the cupboard for a glass and the mug that you left, half full of coffee on the bathroom counter screams to me, begging me touch it as if it would still be warm from your touch.

I was annoyed you were taking so long in the shower.  

I close the bathroom door and see your red Cougar Camp shirt and Addidas shorts in a pile and reach for them only to realize they have long since been packed away.   

The dampness on the floor of the bathtub coating my socks as I leaned over you leave my feet cold.  I can hear the water running, my sleeved soaked from reaching through to turn it off.   

My heartbeat loud in my ears.  The rapid breaths escaping my body.  My hands on your chest, awkwardly pressing your body into the ground.  My words to you sounding like a lifetime movie.  Please don't leave your kids.  They need you....

My heart willing Maya to stay in the living room despite my frantic phone call on speaker and Owen's cries watching my chaos, my counting... 39, 40, 41 and then the sound of heavy footsteps on the stairs.

But I see you and I know the truth.  You weren't leaving, you were gone. 

In my head it sounds unfamiliar, like someone else's story but I can feel it in my bones.

They ache.  Grief isn't just sadness...tears, depression.  It's the heavy down quilt, warm yet suffocating.  Alternating feelings of nausea and despondency.  Agony, anguish, desolation, despair.  A sickly sweet wretchedness oozing, sticky, messy.  Disorganized.

It's what I hate about grief the most.  It's disorganized, unpredictable. 

Now I yearn for you to know Maya and Owen.  She was barely writing the letters for her name when you died and now she's reading books, doing math, writing sentences.  Owen could speak only a handful of words and now he's "reading" me whole books he has memorized, counting to 30, spelling his name, making us all laugh.  They ride bikes, roller skate, play elaborate make believe games and are always looking for warm arms to snuggle in.

There lives and enormous pressure in my heart driving me to remember everything.  Your personality, your voice, your laughter, the way you moved through a room, how we were as a family.  But its so much and I feel overwhelmed.  The more I try to remember the more I feel slip from my hands.

I have not dreaded the days leading up to this anniversary though they have clouded my mind and engulfed my energy but am fearing the memories of the aftermath.  With few exceptions those days are foggy and full of nothing more but attempting to continue moving, breathing, feeling.

It's with this I look around and wonder if you are here.  I long for affirmation that you are fine.  I search for signs that you are close.  While others dream full, animated, colorful, lucid dreams, I wake up blank and are left with wonder about your final destination.