Living with Loss

I’ve never truly loved someone and not given some sacrifice to that person.   It is the nature of love to sacrifice something for the other person; be it large or small, significant or inconsequential, love always, begets sacrifice. For the love of my parents, I lived in a city I hated…and have remained here. Though my disdain for this city has waned over the years, I am still here.   There is a part of me that regrets the choice to stay here, because I thought they needed me .   Yes, I’ve learned that indeed, it was I who needed them, but harboring that belief prohibited me from embracing the beauty what was. My siblings all moved away, raised their families in the place of their choosing, but I stayed. I went to school at a university not of my choosing.   I lived in places I’d rather not have.   I often resented not being able to expand my life by seeing other places, meeting other people or traveling to exotic lands.   But ultimately, my love for ...

T ime turns differently for the mother of a dead child.  Time is slower, much slower, more methodical in it's forward motion. I can sit for an hour and have hundreds of amazing thoughts rush across my mind, and then, just as quickly forget all the fantastic beauty of each of them. Recalling maybe one very simple and mundane task, something like I should boil an egg for breakfast.  Everything takes more out of you when you're the mother of a dead child. This world alive with children, children's activities, children's toys, and children's accomplishments is a playground rife with danger for the mother of a dead child. Breathing in the life of the rest of the world's child-filled lives somehow makes each breath a little heavier and laced with the acerbic taste of emptiness. There is not one thing in life I can do and not be confronted with children and shown the magnificent abundance of having a child in your life and yet simultaneou...

There are these things in life that we call regrets. I've lots of them. I don't regret being a mom, and yes, I would do it all over again even if I knew the agony of this sorrow. Would I have done things differently; without question. Thus, I regret not doing the things in life that spoke to my inner soul, those things we think about as being good and right but we find ourselves too afraid to do or because they seem implausible or risky - outside the boundaries of acceptable and upstanding living. I can't help but wonder if only I'd done them that somehow our Wyatt would be with us today. From the mundane of moving to a different house, buying some land, saying no a little more and pushing a little harder, to the complex dream of taking our life to a more  altruistic path to help others in need, showing and sharing compassion to those who hurt. But, these are  things I can not change now, I can't make them happen now, not like they needed to b...