Along the Blue Ridge

This journey will end when I end.   There is a subset of days in my journey that included my first born child, my son. That subset consists of 29 years and ended abruptly,tragically in an accident  for him while rappelling from a climb.  I began before he did, some 27 years before he did, but I think my life really began when he came into my life and continues through his sister even now.I am attached to these wonderful people who are my children.   What is real and what is not is tough to figure out now.   I have been scrambling to collect all my memories because I am loath to let them go.

I have been writing now for almost three months.  I am writing because I miss talking to him and the words need to go somewhere, along with the frustration and pain.   I am writing because I have always written about everything and this is something I can do to keep myself in check, to keep from spinning off into space.

I have written letters to him, and I have written about him, but nothing seems big enough, full enough.   These are shadow words, splashed with tears.

I never knew how much pain people could endure and still walk on the face of this earth.  I know there are many with pain of many kinds and I never understood, until now.  I wish I did not understand.  I wish I was blissfully ignorant. I wish no one had to feel this awful, empty, impossible feeling.

Reading the paper, the internet, scanning for disasters and finding each new daily loss, I reach out with my heart to each new victim, to each family now shattered with this affliction.   I know it sounds morbid.  It is morbid, but I cannot help myself, it is from guilt of not having taken sufficient notice before.

Who would ever want to think about the death of their child.   Certainly not me.  Every time he traveled, or went for a climb I did think about it, except that day.  Something superstitious in me wants to blame myself, because there is no good thing to blame except maybe gravity.  Perhaps I am to blame for moving to the mountains with my husband and children and allowing them to fall in love with the landscape.   I want to blame something because I need something to focus my frustration on.

Every morning I wake and say to myself, he is gone.  Every time I see his face in a picture my breath catches and sometimes I dissolve in tears.  At night I ready for bed, and look at the face in the mirror,  the new lines grief has written on it and I think, he will not be here tomorrow.  In the night if I wake the first thought is, he is gone.  I never thought about him that much before!   This has been constant for 3 months now.  I wonder, will this ever stop?  Is this the routine I face until I too leave this place?  I have no answers concerning anything anymore.  Decisions are difficult.   To make a plan almost impossible.   The world has had the rug pulled out from under it as far as I can tell and nothing that I ever counted on is dependable any more.   We are not safe.   We never have been.