Forever in My Heart Friday. FIMHF. Week 49. As the one year mark quickly approaches the ferocity of feelings overflows and I found myself lost in my own self torturous emotions and thoughts more than ever. The anticipation of “that day” seems at times, more agonizing than the day itself. Constantly reliving those last moments thinking about how I might have lived those last couple of weeks, or even months differently.
My Timehop App over the past few days is now reminding me of all the text messages between Myesha and I leading up to the days before her surgery and the few short weeks she lived after. Those are messages I now have locked in my phone. They are all I have left, four final weeks of conversation. Four weeks of everything from, “I love you”, “Mom can you bring me a sweet tea from McDonald’s?”, to the agonizing ones of, “Mom, I’m scared”, “I’m in so much pain”, “I just want to cut my foot off so it will stop hurting”. I struggle with the messages where I had to be a “parent” to her and not a “friend” in some of those messages. The guilt of feeling I was being “too mean” or “too hard” on her. Had I known she was going to die would my responses have been the same? Probably not, I don’t know. My mind struggles to make sense of anything, my tears pouring through heavy sobs. I am burdened with regret for always trashing my text messages every so often so save data space on my phone. As a result, I now struggle to delete messages at all from the ones I love most because of the what if’s.
The thing about grief that people seldom tell you is how it repeats itself. How cruelly it pierces you again and again and again. Something unexpectedly trips that invisible landmine buried just beneath the surface of your already frail statute. A song, or a scent, or a date on the calendar, or worst of all seemingly nothing, and the pain of it all comes back just as violently, and clearly, as it did in that moment where it felt as if time had stopped. You find yourself dazed and confused in the battlefield known as your own mind.
That cliché “time heals all wounds” can be very disingenuous because grief never totally disperses. Don’t expect to wake up one morning and feel like you did before. You are changed forever. Grief yields a perennial pain; one that continues to do its invasive work within us for as long as we live. What time does though is give us more perspective. With perspective, comes hope and perseverance. Because as many times as the hurt comes to blindside you, healing follows soon after. Without warning or reason or sense you suddenly begin to feel the unmistakable lightness of unexpected joy, and you get enough strength to keep going one more day. Mommy loves you Myesha! FIM <3 F