2022
New Year, Bobo. As it’s been said in many a posting I’ve read for many a broken hearted parent… “This is the first year you won’t be alive to witness”. To read it and to hear it are one thing. As many “first’s” without you on this Earth, the anticipation leading up to it is a tense, painful exercise. Trying not to spiral in my thoughts, trying not to lose entire days to the worry and the pain. Unlike a lot of things that you tense up for and turn out to not be as bad as imagined, this is as bad as advertised. The truly horrifying part of it is, in the past when you’d worry about something so much that when it finally occurred it wasn’t as bad, it began to train you to be able to control your anxiety, because you’d been proven wrong about whatever that “thing” was you were worried about. It wasn’t as bad, painful, awful as you’d envisioned. But now, with each passing milestone they actually are WORSE than I imagined. And it’s beginning to train me in the other direction. It’s beginning to make me realize that in relation to your loss, each milestone I hit is messy.
Your mom convinced me to go on a cruise. I relented thinking it was a worthwhile distraction to a New Years celebration that would inevitably be depressing. What I hadn’t really thought through was the water surrounding me. As you and I both have become familiar with, my anxiety and hatred of water is at an all time high. And so somehow I decided being out in the open ocean on a ship that has several pools and hot tubs aboard was a good idea. What was I thinking? It turned out to be an assault to my sanity. When inside the interior of the boat I was able to have respites of minutes at a time. But if the boat rocked it reminded me, if I looked toward a window, it reminded me, if I walked by a pool, it reminded me.
The New Years celebration was as you’d expect. An alcohol fueled celebration of a new year, a new hope for something better in the next 12 month period. I think the best thing I read, which actually helped, was something to the effect of a year just being an arbitrary date on a calendar that society has deemed the “New Year”. It really is no different on January 1st, than December 31st.
And with that I began moving forward realizing that, in fact, today, the first day of 2022, is just like yesterday and will be just like tomorrow, in that, you’re with me. And I choose to bring you forward. To live whatever is left of this life with you in my heart and occupying my thoughts. We will be together on this Earth until we are together off this Earth. And THAT, is the truth of it. I miss you, my beautiful wonderful little boy. Constantly, and every day since I lost you, and every day forward.