Your Hands and Feet

Okay, Aaron, here goes...

I've got plans for tomorrow.

We'll see if they happen.

Your car needs to be cleaned out and cleaned, and gotten ready to serve someone else. 

I need (I really do feel the need) to clean out some of the things in your room, and I think I'm getting ready to take your bed down. I mean, if it was in a bedroom, that would be different. But your bedroom for the past 13+ years is also the front room. And it's time, maybe...

I guess we'll see what I can do. And if I can't, I'm not going to force it. I'm learning that growth can't be pushed, not without ramifications. So maybe it's enough to think about it, and maybe I'll get it done. 

This is hard!! I find I want to tell everyone, "don't you know? Can't you feel it? There's a light that's gone out of the world, and it sometimes seems so, so dark." 

Isn't this just a really bad dream? Can't it be? How is it that you're really gone?? 

I was looking at your hand and foot molds from birth, and from a month ago. They're different, and yet, still so similar. Your tiny hands and feet are (were?) much larger, but you still had the funny quirks in your toes, and your hands still naturally curved in with your fingers almost overlapping.

Do you remember how we worked on your hands when you were tiny? They were so tight! If you held our finger, it would hurt. But I would pump while you were being fed with the feeding tube, and I would massage your hands. You learned that hand massage and full tummy went together, which we carried through your whole life. Hand massage would help you know you were safe, loved, cared for. 

And those last few minutes of your life, and the next several hours of mine, I held and stroked your hand. 

I miss your touch, my son. It wasn't just you that was comforted; it was me, too. And now it's gone. 

Honestly, I really do okay most of the time. That you're missing is always an undertone to just about everything, but it's a quiet background hum, sometimes almost not noticeable. But night comes. It gets dark, and this time that we shared over and over through the years has been fundamentally changed. 

Oh, my baby.... I hurt.

“It isn’t in my past. It’s in my everyday.” 

– Helen Wilson