Category: Uncategorized

During the first year or so of grief you’re numb.  You’re not really thinking about anyone else, just trying to survive day to day.  Time passes slowly and fast at the same time.

You are so involved in your grief, you forget about everything else.  You stop caring what other people think, especially as it concerns yourself.  People still had opinions about what Parker and I did, I just really didn’t care as much.  I miss this.

This didn’t give me a license to run my mouth, I’m already good at that anyway.  I didn’t see it as an opportunity to burn others because I just didn’t care.  I just didn’t let their thoughts and opinions influence my life or make me feel bad about myself.  For the first time I realized that they had never stood where we were, therefore their negativity was irrelevant.  It meant nothing.

I’ve never felt so free, although I didn’t realize it at the time.  I mean, did it really matter what anyone had to say to us in comparison to us losing Benny?  All of the petty drama and bullshit became nonexistant in my head.  That nagging voice that always made me overthink my every waking move disappeared completely.  I was free from my own insecurities, most of which were petty and ridiculous anyway.  I’m pretty sure my own guilt overtook most of that anyway.

I would never have been able to blog like this before the accident.  Put into words all of my crazy thoughts and share them with the world.  I grew up in a house where emotions were not welcome.  I’m trying so hard not to make that same mistake, though it’s hard.

There are days when I miss the fog.  I miss not caring what other people think.  I make myself crazy sometimes (ask Parker as he’d surely agree).  If I could hold onto one part of the first year it would be my ability to shut it off.  Tune out the crap.  Remember to be grateful for what I have and not to let others influence how I feel about me.

That statement in and of itself makes my skin crawl, because I know how bad that first year was.  I’m shocked that I would want any part of it back, but I do.

I guess this is part of it.  Moving past the grief enough that other things outside of losing my son hurt.  I didn’t expect it to happen, no one warned me I would feel this way again.

I’m pretty I don’t like it for two reasons:  the insecurity and the fact that it feels like moving on.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to be stuck in grief forever, but even thinking about moving on is sad to me.  It’s been 2 years and 2 months.  Longer than his 17 months.  How did that happen already?

 

I remember one of my first thoughts moments after the accident occurred was that this couldn’t be happening again.  I wasn’t supposed to lose someone close to me again.  I had already survived what I considered to be my life’s tragedy when I lost my mom.  It felt impossibly wrong.  I just kept saying, why is this happening AGAIN?!?!?!

My mom died 20 years ago this May.  Tonight we just found out that my dad’s wife has a very rare form of stage IV bone cancer.  How is this happening again to him?  How is any of this fair?  My life has taken on this surreal feeling again, where I’m unsure what is real and what isn’t.

Besides losing Benny, the darkest hours of my life were when my mom was sick and after she passed.  Even though my parents had a complicated relationship, my dad was incredible for my mom when she was sick.  He was unwavering in his strength and willingness to do anything and everything for her.  I guess that I’m lucky because in those moments I got to witness what real, unadulterated love looks like.  For all of his faults, that man was truly amazing for my mom when she was sick.

But he was sick too.  My dad is an alcoholic, plain and simple.  I had spent 14 years of my mom sparing me from most of that though and my dad and I had a pretty good relationship.  I’m one of those lucky people that really had an amazing childhood complete with what I consider to be great family memories, undiluted by my father’s illness.  As a child I really didn’t know any different, ignorance is bliss.

When my mom passed, obviously everything changed.  I was alone in my house with my father, alone being the key word.  He disappeared.  Fell apart.  Broke down.  My life became a series of days – going to school, coming home, taking whatever money was left on the counter to buy dinner and going to bed, waking up at whatever time in the morning to hear my father stumble in the door, clearly drunk.  I would spend a lot of time at friends homes because no one was ever home at mine.  I coped the best that I could by hiding behind a smile and moving forward.  Trying to keep it together, thinking it could always be worse.  Wondering why it was my mom that had passed.  Looking back, it was a dark time, but I was too young to even comprehend what I was going through and know how completely wrong it was.

It’s probably  why after Benny died, it was so important to me that Parker and I didn’t shut down on Darcy or each other.  It’s why I don’t accept people disappearing from our lives as ok, or have any ability to deal with their weaknesses.  I’m still not great at expressing emotion because quite honestly, if I let myself feel 100% of what I should, I would probably be in a padded room somewhere.  But that’s ok, because I know my limitations and I’m trying my damndest to work through them to be as healthy as I can for my family.  I’m not strong, I’m just doing what I need to do to survive.

It’s taken a very long time, but we finally have a good relationship again, probably not the healthiest, but it works for us.  I’m terrified about what all of this means for my father and my own family.  I don’t know if he’s strong enough to go through this again.  I’m angry as all hell that he should even have to.  Has he not suffered enough?  I just don’t get it.  We’re given one life to live, how many times can you just roll through the punches before enough is enough?   My stepmother actually apologized to him for getting sick, because she doesn’t want him to have to go through this again.  My heart is breaking for both of them. How many tragedies should one have to endure in their lifetime?  This is my question.

This topic has been a long time coming.  As I sit here rocking Fletch at 3:30 AM, it feels weird to write about such things.  This is part of the new paradigm that exists in my life of joy/sadness.  Hard to except that they now exist mutually exclusively.

After the accident, it was if my driveway didn’t exist.  It was like a game I used to play when I was little, it was ‘hot lava’ and I couldn’t go near it or I’d be burned.  It was my achilles heel, still is.

I used to park on a side street and go through my backyard.  The problem was the school hours parking ban and climbing up brick steps and then balancing along my stone retaining wall to even get to my yard.  Not a great option in New England winters.

I knew once Fletch was here things would have to change.  At first my solution was to park at the base of the driveway and still only use the bottom portion.  This then required climbing a hill of ground covering up to the house.  The only way to any door in my house was up.  Carrying the carseat this way didn’t make any sense.

Eventually I just gave up and started parking in the driveway again.  It was the only ‘safe’ way to get Fletch into the house.  Parker had always backed in since the accident, the theory being that we wouldn’t get caught in any open doors should the car roll.

I can’t begin to tell you the number of times I check to see if the car is in park.  It’s become an OCD habit.  I refuse to pull keys from the ignition unless I’m in the car.  I triple check the parking break as extra assurance, although I’m not entirely sure how helpful it really is.

We live on a busy enough street, on a curve in a hill.  Backing into this driveway sucks.  People aren’t always very patient with me and make me panic when they come flying down the hill at me.  To say I have anxiety over backing into my driveway is an understatement.

The week before the 2 year anniversary of the accident, I found I had to pull in one rainy day because someone had parked at the bottom.  Well, Parker came home and this unnerved him which in turn stressed me out further.  You really can’t see well out of the back of the suburban.  I had already backed into the fence and the Volvo, further adding to my discomfort.

The Friday anniversary of the accident found me running late to get home to get Darcy off the bus.  Friday always seems tougher than the actual anniversary date for me.  As I came down Chester Street, Darcy’s bus was headed uphill. I could see Darcy up on our lawn and breathed a sigh of relief.  I started to back into the driveway and Darcy was on my right up on the grass.  The driveway is steep, so I usually have to gun it a bit to get the Suburban up it.  At the last second I stopped because Darcy was gone from my sight.  This was strange as she knows to stay away from moving vehicles.  I started looking around in panic, and there she was, peering at me on my left, in my drivers side window.  I wanted to scream at her and cry, yet hold her and never let her go in that same instant.

She had walked behind the truck as I was backing up the driveway.  It was just about 3:30 on Friday afternoon.  A little after tragedy had struck in that exact same spot two years prior.  It took everything in me to get out of that truck not completely lose it.  How could something so similar almost have happened again, in the same spot, at almost the same time?!?!?  What.  The.  Fuck.

Thank goodness I stopped and looked for her.  I couldn’t see her from where I was because the lawn is higher than the driveway, something made me pause and duck down to see if she was where she should be.

So much for feeling like backing in was now the safest way to be in our driveway.  I guess that nothing would ever really make me feel comfortable again anyway.  It’s all just a false sense of security.

If only this driveway wasn’t a part of this house.  If only I could pick up my house and move it away to somewhere new.  It’s time to admit this doesn’t work.  We tried, but perhaps it’s time to move on.  This also fills me with joy/sadness because being free of this driveway excites me, but this is my home.  This is where I brought my babies home from the hospital, yet where my son died.  It’s hard to balance these two emotions sometimes when they’re everywhere in your life.  Why can’t it just be one or the the other?  Why does it have to be both at once?

WordPress just let me know that I started my blogging journey two years ago.  I am dumbfounded as it seems like 2 minutes ago some days.  Time is funny like that.

Two years, a lot can change in two years, this I know.

I’m writing this as my husband is at the emergency vet with our nearly 17 year old cat saying good-bye.  He began getting sick on Christmas Eve and we’d been nursing him for the last few days hoping to turn things around, but it wasn’t meant to be.  We had 4 pets before the kiddos, and the last 2 had held on until recently.  We had to put my dog Bailey down at the end of September and now this.  My heart is broken again.

As I’m on the phone crying with my husband, I don’t even know what to say to Darcy.  Just another death in this house.  At 7 she’s lost her brother and 4 pets.  Too much death.  Too much sadness.  Just too much.

So happy anniversary to me.  At least I have this when nothing else in this world is making sense.  Godspeed Toby, go find the rest of the pack.

We went to visit Benny today and someone did this…

There are no words.  Lots of happy tears though!  Thank you so much to whoever did this for Benny.  Brought a smile to our faces.

It’s been a really messed up few days.  It’s Murphy’s Law all over the place and it has put me in a horrible mood, which is terrible when Christmas is 2 days away.  This is my attempt to counteract all of the BS and remember the good.

Dear Darcy,

I know this is a blog for Benny, but I feel that this post should be all about you.  It should be all about the surviving siblings that carry their parents along in the wake of their grief.

This will be our third Christmas without your little brother.  I don’t know how that is possible, how that much time has passed, but it has.  Things have changed so much for our family over the past two years as we head into this third Christmas without Benny.  This year we are so lucky to add Fletcher to our family as he celebrates his first Christmas.

That first Christmas without Benny was rough.  It was just over a month after the accident and we were all trying to figure out what to do.  Do we hang his stocking, his ornaments?  How do we do so without completely losing it?  Do we keep old traditions or start new ones?  We only had Bennett with us for one Christmas, how do we immortalize that?  So many questions, no wrong answers.

The only thing that I knew was that it needed to still be magical for you.  You were only just 5 and still trying to wrap your head around what death really was and what had really happened.  I was terrified that we were going to be lost in our grief and forget about the little girl that so badly needed something to keep her going.

So, we set about doing our best.  We saw Santa and you smiled and had your picture taken without your little brother.  But you SMILED, you were happy.  We went to a family gathering where no one even brought Benny up, even though it had been less than 2 months.  I wanted to scream at them that they were making it worse.  I remember seeing you laughing and excited and thinking to myself, it’s ok, Darcy is ok.  It diffused the situation.  I actually enjoyed shopping for you (maybe a little too much) and wrapping up presents that I knew would make you smile.

You put out cookies and milk and we read ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas’ without your brother.  We watched you run down the stairs alone Christmas morning all excited and tear through your presents.  It made it hurt a little less to see you so happy, to play with you.

We wrote letters to Benny and put them in his stocking.  We cried as a family not knowing at all how to really do any of this without Benny.  But we did it.  And you made it magical.  You made it better.  You made it fun again.

A lot of things died with Benny on November 8th, but not your spirit.  You are one of the most amazing little girls I know and you saved us that first Christmas.  Your dad and I decided early on that your life wasn’t going to be about Bennett’s death.  You taught us so much about healing and love, but mostly about the resiliency of children.  You made us smile and laugh again.  You made me feel again at a time when I really didn’t want to.  I owe you so much for that little girl!  Thank you for being who you are and loving the way you do.

XOXO Mom

 

CYG – Day 26:  Gratitude

Today I’m grateful for:

• Good night’s sleep
• Baby snuggles
• Little girl kisses
• Husband hugs
• Good friend surprises
• The smell of clean laundry
• The feeling I get after picking up my house
• Holding sleeping new babies

CYG -Da 23:  Love Letter

Running a little behind on my posts, so bear with me.  This topic is one that I’ve been thinking about for weeks now.  It’s so hard for me to choose who to write to to express my love.  There have been so many amazing people in our lives.

I could write it to Parker, because he has been totally amazing, patient and loving throughout this whole grieving process, but he never honestly goes on my blog.  Every once in awhile I’ll send him a link or read it to him or get an opinion, but this is MY personal journey.  And honestly, most of the stuff posted here we’ve already chatted about.  One of these days I’ll get him to write something here.  Maybe pick a ropic and we can both write down our thoughts.  But I digress.

To the Two Ladies in My Life (you onow who you are),

There really aren’t words to express how much you mean to me, just like there weren’t words when Benny passed.  But I didn’t need words, just someone to be there, hold me up and tell me it’s ok to cry.

Even before the accident, you both have always supported me and my family.  Even though we are not related, you have become family, another Auntie and Grandmother to my kiddos.  You loved Benny as if he were your own and not once did either of you ever stop to think of your own grief, but rather mine.

When everything happened you leaped into action and took so much on your shoulders.  You were here for days helping us to make decisions, bringing food and just being here.  When it was all over, it didn’t stop.  You still called, you still showed up.  You were able to do what so many others couldn’t and you never put a time limit on our grief.

You have watched Darcy for us so that Parker and I would be able to spend time together as a couple, trying to figure this all out.  You listened to me try to navigate Darcy’s grief.  You listened to me complain about disability, insurance and every other obstacle that we faced outside of grief.

There was never judgement.  That’s not to say that you didn’t give me a nudge every once in awhile if I was being unfair.  You talk about my son always and celebrate him in your own ways.  You are the ones that Benny knew best and loved so much.  He was so lucky to have you in his life.

You have celebrated Fletcher with me and welcomed him into this complicated, new life.  You get how hard of a balance this has been.  You have loved him as I’ve loved him, as an Auntie or Grandmother would.

You took care of me in the absence of my mother.  You have no idea how that feels.  It’s been so long that I’ve felt that way.  It’s been so long since I would let anyone do anything for me.

Some say blood is thicker than water.  I say my friends are the family that I chose for myself, because we don’t need proof of kin to show that we’re family.  You both amaze me with your love and generosity.  We all love you so much!  I’m so lucky to call you mine!  XOXO

Everything Doesn’t Happen For A Reason

Amazing, perfectly written, it’s like he’s in my head.  Best piece on this I’ve read so far.

CYG – Day 22:  Dreams + Rituals

Do I dream about Benny?  It’s been awhile.  I wish I could dream about him more often.  He was the one that told us about Fletch.  Both Parker and I had a Benny dream and knew instantly that we were pregnant and that it was a boy, before I ever took a pregnancy test.

I wish that I could hold him in my dreams.  I would never want to wake up, but remain in dreamland, but that’s not reality.

For Benny’s birthday we gather at the cemetary to remember.  We go for a walk around the neighborhood where he grew up and we release balloons.  It’s turned into a day of celebration.  We get to remember who he was and how many lives he touched in those hort 18 months.

The anniversary of his death is somewhat different.  We head to the cemetary with Tara and Chris and the kids and then we head out of town.  I cannot celebrate that day, nor do I want to remember it.  I’d rather not be near the house either.  It just feels better being somewhere else for a few days.