Three fucking months, today.
Each minute has been a blur blending into the next. The anticipation of the 9th of each month causes my anxiety to skyrocket. I didn’t sleep last night, not completely atypical for my insomniatic self, just another opportunity to spend seemingly endless hours in my head, trapped with what-ifs and why-mes.
I spent hours recounting every minute of that dreadful day. Every single minute.
I often lay awake, staring at the fan, listening to music or a sleep story that is supposed to help but doesn’t, wondering what it is I did to deserve this hell I now call my life.
I’ve read the books, listened to podcasts, spoken with therapists and grief experts. I know I didn’t “do” anything to deserve losing my baby…. In my head. Not sure my heart and head are on the same page. They may never be.
What I am learning is that losing a child changes your DNA, who you are, thought you were, how you view the world. Everything.
This weekend we started transforming Jaidon’s “room,”which more of an area that we made work when covid hit and needed our own spaces in our tiny house. We started to morph the basement into a place where we could all hang out and enjoy life and think of him, doing what he loved, playing on the computer, video games, watching TV.
We distributed his furniture to the girls’ rooms, at their requests, and left his stuff as is on the shelves and his desk and computer in tact but moved them to feel more like family room and less like a makeshift bedroom.
Devastating. Just fucking devastating, a mild word for what I really feel. Troy and I, for the past three months have been pretty good at taking turns being strong for one another while the other falls apart. But not this week. Between the three month marker and the high holidays and trying to feel like we were sharing his stuff, not erasing his room, it was too much to deal with. We fell apart together.
At some point we will go through his stuff, clothes, unpack his suitcase, which may eternally sit next to my side of the bed unpacked, because for whatever reason, I just cannot unpack it.
But for today we will exist and that will just have to be good enough.