Just keepin’ it real

I don’t have a beautiful, eloquent memorial post to publish on Thursday – on the day my sweet Duncan would have been two years old.

Instead, I have the reality of a week that has been hard to live in.  It’s not so much the dates themselves that are the trigger points.  It’s the events.  It’s the Dancing with the Stars semifinals on ABC.  The hometown visits on American Idol.  The packing of suitcases for a trip to Ohio for what is supposed to be “only” a golf scrambles.

It is sitting in an orange chair in a green nursery rocking a baby that wouldn’t even exist but for the loss of her big brother’s life, yet still having to tamp down the thought of “two years ago right this very minute, that foolish, arrogant, inattentive obgyn was ripping my cervix to shreds.”

This week has been an exercise in survival – going through the motions of play dates, and balancing checkbook registers, and follow-up pediatrician appointments, and peanut-butter-and-jelly-sandwich-making, when really?  The anxiety and sorrow is bubbling just out of sight below the surface of my skin.

I sent an email to a friend on Wednesday telling her that I thought it’d be different this year. I thought, somehow, that I’d be better.  That it wouldn’t hurt so much.  That there’d be some closure.  That the memories wouldn’t overwhelm me to the point that I, literally, would curl up in a ball in my bed and pull the comforter over me so that the air around me became as suffocating as the sadness and longing inside me.

But….I woke up Wednesday, fully aware of the hours of the clock, and how they were racing toward Thursday.  Thursday, when I will be completely in tune with the minutes falling away until 8:14 pm.

I’ve filled my day Thursday with things to distract me – not in a naive attempt to make myself unaware – but merely so that I’m not just dwelling on the clock.  Maybe, when we are in Hendersonville running errands, I’ll swing by Gigi’s and treat us all to some birthday cupcakes.  If the weather cooperates, maybe we’ll go take some pictures by Duncan’s tree.  Maybe I’ll wake up and not be able to get out of bed, and I’ll have to give Tiffany the code to our garage so she can come in and feed my kids.  (I’m kidding.  I’m not that self-involved.  I may want  to be, but I won’t be.)

I don’t know….

We watch CBS’s The Good Wife, and the season finale on Tuesday played a Mika song during the closing scenes, and the melody has haunted me all day….

I just know that on May 19, 2009, I said goodbye to the world I thought I lived in….and two years later, I’m still learning the language of my new world.  I “smile and try to mean it,” but in these days of May, when I’m fighting with all my might to live in the moment – to be present, to be grateful, to be anything but defined by the death of my son – it’s hard, y’all.  It’s so hard.

I’d give anything to go back and have more time with my Itty Bitty fighter ….I still miss him so.