Honouring the Loss - Counting the Days

Every day I wake up, I think about my son. Every 12th of the month I wake up and think about the lose of my son. Its not something I can avoid. No matter how hard I try, the date is imprinted on my soul, and it resonates in my mind - the 12th is the date I lost my son.

I try so hard not to think about time or the passage of the time. I ignore time so much that I am never sure exactly what year it is. I always have to check the year if I have to confront it. I have ignored time so totally that I thought today marked 2 and a 1/2 years since CJ left us.

When CJ was younger we honoured and celebrated every date that marked the progression of his life. In his first year we had a half birthday for him, we were too impatient to wait for the full birthday.

Now, counting in a new way, moving away from the date, I am now counting backwards the days that he has been gone. Isn't it time that I honour those days, instead of trying to forget them, forget the passage of time?

Imagine my surprise when I went on Facebook and found out, the date was not what I had thought. I had missed the 2 and a half mark. We were in the 7th month. I realized that I could not do that anymore. I counted every single step from birth to death. I needed now to honour him, to count those days as I walked away from the last day of his life.

In these days since he has been gone, I have learned so much. I have learned that our society does not do grief well. Rather than honour the grief and embrace the grief, so many people still try to bury the grief. I have learned that you can't run from the grief. It is a measure of the joy that came before and it has to be served. I have learned that you can serve that grief from different prospectives, and they are all valid. One day it may be that screaming at the universe is the right thing to do, and the next you phone a friend to talk about a wonderful memory that popped into your head. I have learned that talking about them is good, it is normal, and it is necessary. And yet, even though I learned all this, I too tried to deny the grief, deny the pain, by stopping the counting of the days.

Today, the 12th, I woke up and thought about the loss of my son. I realized that counting the days can be a way to honour him. I woke up and thought about the loss of my son. Then I moved from the loss, to the memories, I looked at pictures, I posted to his pictures to social media, I wrote in this blog. I woke up thinking of the loss of my son -- the rest of the day will be dedicated to remembering the life.