This Night

6 years ago, my darling Luke died.
That’s 2192 days, my app tells me.

6 years is a thing.

This year THE day is THE date.
No more ‘It’s the Friday night/ Saturday morning that he died’ though it’s not yet October 1st.
Followed by October 1st.

It’s always the day of the week that hits me hardest.
The date seems less important, though that is how the world outside my body marks it.
But this year my body and the outside world, are one.

Year 6 is also an issue with the siblings.
They no longer want their year punctuated with the birth and death dates of their lost siblings or maybe this year, they voice it.

The Mothers of the grief group are torn betwixt honoring their children both living and dead.

Mothers are left wanting to mark their darkest of nights, lighting the way with a thousand candles, but for whom, they know not.
The distance from that fateful day is unclear, but still they are not here.

Everyday is hard, every night.
So why is this night so extra hard?
Why is THIS night, the night that we cease to function?
This night and the nights and days that precede and follow THIS night?
Whatever it is... I am lost again.

I have done SO much yet now, tonight... it all seems worthless.

I love and miss Luke as much as I ever did.
Yet I can barely remember what it was to be in his presence.

The guilt, the imaginings, all the words I ever wrote are all upon me, tonight, in the very hours that he was leaving this world.

And so I surrender to the tears and the hopeless yearning, knowing, finally, that he is never coming back, and for that I feel a betrayal that I never felt before. Have I given up on him?
Or have I lost the comfort of denial?

Do the siblings arrive at this knowing before us?
Maybe, for me, this final dawning of knowing, is what makes year 6 so hard.

Yet the love of a child is infinite and endures.

I love you Luke.
You are so loved and so missed.
I wish things were different.

Mum x