Simple

I miss him.  All the time, every day.  It's just part of who I am now.  Missing Silas is what I do while I'm doing everything else.

Almost 2 years now and my grief has certainly changed in many ways, but there is a core aspect to it that has not transformed at all.  I have transformed around it, even though you'd have to look hard to see it.

I talk to lots of people all day between my two very social jobs and none of them would ever know or suspect the pain that lives in my heart all the time.  It almost makes me smile now, that pain.  It's my little secret with my little missing son.

I'm a father who doesn't have to do a thing, has no responsibilities, with no expectations and no chance to fuck anything up.  Or, at least, fuck up anything else.  Really wish he and I got off to a better start.  Instead here I am and there he isn't.  A nightmare fatherhood in a disaster of a life.

Yet somehow I manage to laugh these days.  Time is inexorable and all I can do is forge straight ahead and try to stay upright.  Without laughter, without humor, I would have given up long ago.  Laughter is one of the few things that pierces my persistent sadness.

Music;  Love;  Delicious food and drink;  The raw beauty of the world around me;  The faces of my friends and family;  Silence in the night when I'm on the couch with a book I cannot put down; Lu's lips on mine.  Sadness succumbs to all of these, for a time.

I miss him and I'm trying hard not to miss life itself.

I'm sure you all feel like this:

There is no one else in the world like me.  And you're right.  The unique razor edges of your grief is like a deadly snowflake, the peaks and valleys of your emotions your own personal fingerprint of doom.  We are each alone in the ongoing experience of our individual losses and it is easy to feel so vastly different than everyone else when everyone else around us has no idea how deep this pain goes.

Or maybe they do, I sometimes remind myself.  Everyone has their own story, their own pain, their own raging lament at the injustice of life.  Maybe they are hiding just as much anguish, just in different sector of their soul.  The litany of disaster is easy to recite and difficult to deny, for any of us.

Every day is denial here.  Denial of depression.  Denial of apathy.  Denial of how easy it would be to just give up and lay down and never get up again.  It doesn't feel possible, that we can keep going even though we are getting smacked down month after month after month but yet here I am, not giving up.

There is a strange sort of inevitability to behaving like this, for me.  I don't really feel like giving up is even a choice.  It just seems so... boring and listless.  I don't think I could stand it, just sitting around with my given-up self all the time.  I already know what a complete jackass that version of myself is, and I couldn't bear to spend any amount of time with me behaving like that.

Besides, I've been all the way to the bottom and it's a scary fucking place.  Walls, floors, windows, faces, food, sounds, scents, they all stopped making any sense at all and I could feel the ease of oblivion close by.  I still don't quite understand how my body managed to function in those first days after he died.  I shouldn't have been able to swallow or breathe.  I shouldn't have been able do anything at all and yet, still, again, somehow, here I am with a little smile on my face confessing to the fact that I can go on living even though my son is dead.

It shouldn't be possible in so many ways, but the simple fact of his death is a proof of the geometry of life.  It is something that is absolutely true in a world that is filled with gray areas and half-lies.  There's no way to hide from it.  No way to reason with it.  No way to change it or fix it or alter it in any way.  It is simple.  It is final.  It is true.  He's dead.  I'm alive.  And now I get to spend the rest of my time here trying to reconcile those 2 truths even though they are perpendicular lines --true forms-- that intersected once and never will again.  Or at least, not in this world.

Part of me went with him.  Part of him stayed with me.  Now it is an impenetrable nugget that lives inside me that is impossible to explain.  It is a single point of existence, a raw, elemental dot that is painful and compelling and beautiful and terrible.  His death is not just a moment, not just a period of time in my life, rather it is an ongoing experience that continues to alter my entire life and everyday experience.

Ah, sirens in the street, right outside the house just like that day when he died.  It is always that day, now, for a little while.  Then time pulls me forward and I miss him and I miss who I could have been and the only way out is to push all of that back inside me.  I push it back into a single, simple point of truth and loss.  Then I focus directly on right now, right in front of me, whatever it is that has to happen next.  I will do it because doing nothing is worse than anything.  Doing nothing is too simple.  Doing nothing is a denial of his life, as brief and unfulfilled as it was.

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Do you still have a sense of humor?  What makes you laugh?  What do you do to stay upright?  What are the simple truths that you hold on to?