The seven-year anniversary of our son’s death…it feels significant. Seven, as a number, means something, doesn’t it? I grew up hearing seven described as the “perfect” number. We can rattle off many associations with seven: seven heavens, seven wonders of the world, seven days a week, seven continents, seven seas, lucky seven.
Seven has been on my mind. Seven-year anniversary dates have been plentiful since last September. Tyler died a week shy of seven months after his initial leukemia diagnosis. His final battle in the ICU lasted seven weeks. Seven years ago today, he died.
As I’ve approached this seventh anniversary, something in my grief has been shifting. Dealing with this loss…it’s different now.
In an effort to grasp onto what has altered for me, I took a big breath and did something I simply dread doing: I read back through my posts.
As I navigated through the first two years without him, the weight of my loss groaned at me through the written page:
…breath-stealing pain
…the most abject sense of loss imaginable
…horrible bouts of missing him
…sorrow over losing his future
…confusion over my current place in the world
…flashbacks and nightmares
…this pain and hurt only seem to worsen as time marches on
…a constant mantra – “I have no son!” – plays an endless loop inside me
…I’m completely overtaken by horrible, horrible loss and everything else around me becomes inconsequential
…the trauma of remembering what Tyler suffered grips me. I feel like I could shatter at any moment. Tears, the ugly kind, erupt without notice and catch me by surprise. The pain is often crippling, consuming
…a year without you is unspeakable. It’s not supposed to be. I don’t want this, Tyler, but I’m powerless to change it
…words like missing, longing, grieving: they’re just empty words. They don’t capture what’s in my heart. They don’t capture what’s gone from my heart. They don’t do justice describing my Tyler-less world
…I can no more stop the sadness than I can stop breathing
…I am encased – body, mind, and soul – in this terrible sorrow. It’s like being imprisoned in quicksand, yet somehow free to go about daily life, laugh, make plans, all while each movement requires herculean effort against the heaviness and pressure of the quicksand. Managing each waking moment of each day involves fighting not to be swallowed into this vortex of grief – the reality of my life without you
…words don’t help; time doesn’t help, because nothing can change the reality that you are no longer here, Tyler
…I want to see you, Tyler. I just want so badly to see you
…this second year of grief has been harder for me, in many ways, than the first
I read on past the second year through to the fifth year, and it dawned on me that a new chapter was emerging. My journey was fraught with new struggles related to the passage of time. Time was both an enemy and a mockery – it was stealing my boy from me even as its purported healing remained elusive:
…so when I didn’t feel better… I felt like a failure at grieving. I had to change my expectation. The pain wasn’t going to go away. The scar tissue… Not healed. Still there. Taking up residence and space in my life
…life was marching on, relegating my vibrant, vivacious son to a shadow world of memories that I feared were fading with time
…I lay there trying to make sense of how the very universe, at least my place in it, had shifted. My own world – once a colorful place – now faded, fainter, pallid
…I am still trying to grasp this new world with him not in it. I feel like if I could find the words to describe the impact of his absence in this world, I could define my grief
…that’s how I think about my life now: living in the after. I’m learning in the after. I’m loving in the after. I smile and laugh and hope and sometimes even dream and plan in the after. But it will still always be the after
…grief insinuates itself into my joy. It sometimes feels like a tug-of-war: grief insists that pain dominate any joy in my life; I insist that joy dominate the pain in my life. Grief and I, we are at counter-purposes. The joy is there, but it has become complicated
…it may seem counter-intuitive, but I haven’t longed for a release from the pain. The pain is a tether to my child. It is a silent but demanding partner in my life. It drains me, exhausts me, feeds off my soul. But feeling it means I am feeling Tyler. Feeling him deeply
…as the pain lessens – and I know it must – I am faced with finding other ways to preserve a connection to my boy, this impossibly precious son who ushered me into motherhood
…so this past Easter Sunday, I stood in our church’s gymnasium. My heart felt pinched, my lungs felt restricted by the tightness in my chest, my eyes felt gritty as I willed away the tears. There would be songs about Heaven today, songs that would hurt
…likewise, the years on my calendar march on. You would think at this point, four years later, his loss would be a settled aspect of life, yet sometimes it still feels so… unreal
…yes, my heart is still beating. But because Tyler’s heart no longer beats, even four years later, I also live with something I can only describe as an unceasing pull. It’s a constant tugging on my soul to be where Tyler is
…but you learn as the years pass that this isn’t going to end. [It] is now part of your life and will be until the day you die. The day you’re finally able to run right into those arms. And until that day, you will always be a little physically exhausted, a little emotionally drained, a little soul weary. From the effort it costs you to push through
…for me, logic dictates that improvement should come with the passage of time. So why, all these days, weeks and months later am I still brokenhearted, still beleaguered by painful memories, still not better at this? That’s my why to the universe
…and my whys were dogged by other impossible questions. Is it always going to be like this? When will this end? Am I doing this wrong?
…I’ve been shaking my fist at grief because it’s been trouncing me. Its predictability. Its unpredictability. Its endlessness. Its senselessness
After five years, my focus changed again. Was it possible for me to be repurposed, to exist and live and serve outside of my grief?
God had been ever so patient with this daughter of His, who was so confused about how to invest my time, my energy, my focus, on anything other than parenting my son. Who no longer knew how I was supposed to use my gifts when I could no longer bestow them on this amazing human being.
God comforted me in every way. He patiently loved me, understood me, and wrapped me tight in His sustaining arms. God wasn’t rushing me to figure this out. He seemed content to let this mother grieve the joy I’d found in raising my son. He knew, even if I didn’t, that it wouldn’t always be about survival.
So I sat on my son’s memorial bench and tilted my face toward night sky. I gave my loneliness to God. I’ve become familiar with the way loss of a child naturally separates me from others.
And I shared my heart with Him. I acknowledged the struggle I’d had with knowing my purpose since the day my son ceased to be. I thanked God for His patience with me. I offered Him my fears, my inadequacies, my insistence on staying in my comfort zone. Tears again fell unchecked, this time a release as I surrendered my will to whatever God wanted.
Not survival, life. A life with purpose.
And now, sitting here at the keyboard on the date that marks seven years without my child, I’m reflecting back over the past two years since that five-year post and trying to take stock of what has shifted for me.
I’m reflecting on all the many times this past year that I’ve gotten choked up when thinking of Tyler or talking about him. I actually cried in church just this past Sunday – a tissue-blowing, make-up-dabbing cry. Tears that were triggered, as they so often are, by a song about heaven.
And I’m reflecting on how episodes like this have diminished over the past two years.
I’m reflecting on how I fared on Tyler’s birthday last October, our seventh birthday without him. I struggled, as I always do, in the days leading up to his birthday. I felt especially bereft about not being able to know what he’d look like, who he would be at age 22. I was certain he’d be an amazingly handsome young man, and my unmet need to see him and know him tormented me.
And I’m reflecting on how, still, I did better with this birthday than I had on others.
Our seventh Christmas without him came and went. For the first time, I was able to decorate the house without painful memories.
And I’m reflecting on how I had a single tearful morning during the Christmas holidays this past year. Just one.
I’m reflecting on how much less I ruminated about the significant dates along his final seven-week journey toward death. I thought of the trauma, but I didn’t re-experience the trauma.
And I’m reflecting on how this year, the memories that assault my mind this time of year were not as intense, nor were they crippling.
And I’m reflecting on one final thing. The other day I recalled something funny Tyler had done, and I laughed. Laughing in response to my memories of him was not unusual. What was unusual was that my enjoyment was untainted by sadness.
I remembered my boy and felt singularly happy. I stopped and contemplated this.
This was momentous, and I felt as though I’d trekked beyond some kind of grief frontier.
I wrote something four Mother’s Days ago. I came across it as I was reading through my past posts in my attempt to measure the shift in my grief:
I’m not there yet, but perhaps soon, the tether between Tyler and me will be fashioned increasingly by memories that make me smile, and less by pain. And maybe someday soon, that won’t feel as wrong to me as it does on this day.
And here I am, this seventh anniversary. The lessening of the pain no longer makes me feel guilty. Pain no longer is the primary tether to Tyler. My memories are.
And the other day, one of those memories filled me with joy.
I will never – can never – be the same person I was prior to Tyler’s death seven years ago. There is no restoring that. So healing is a complete misnomer.
My grief on this day seven years later is as huge as my grief was on March 29, 2012. Time has made it so that my grief no longer consumes my entire life, as it did when Tyler first died. Time has made it so that day-by-day in 2019 doesn’t feel like day-by-day in 2012.
I was trying to describe this shift over time recently to a friend who’d lost his precious daughter. I wrote,
“I carry the sorrow and I know I always will. I think of him every day. But with pleasure and love and smiles. Life is no longer a placeholder, the end of which will finally end the pain. Life is life – it’s good, it’s purposeful, and it’s even joyful.”
But I still can’t wait to be reunited with my boy when my life this side of heaven ends.
And I fully expect that seven years from now, the tears will still flow freely.