A Mourning Mom

August, Already?

It is August again.  This month is filled with happy days and harder days.   Lots of family birthdays and anniversaries are in August as well as Jake’s birth and death days.  This year there will be one less happy day.  I had always looked forward to my grandfather‘s birthday at the end of the month.  I knew he would not live forever but I still miss him.

I will take August like I do every day – day by day.  I have made it through many Augusts without Jake and I will make it through this one as well.

“You don’t get over it, you just get through it. You don’t get by it, because you can’t get around it. It doesn’t ‘get better’; it just gets different. Everyday… Grief puts on a new face….”

― Wendy Feireisen

This year is also filled with getting ready to go back to school.  The twins start 1st grade this week!   We already had the Open House to meet their teachers.  I did not even (outwardly) flinch when another parent asked if we had already been to the upper campus with our older child.  I did not choke back tears when she said, “Oh, that is right you do not have older children.”   I bit my lip and did not say a thing although she is one of the few parents at the twins’ elementary school who know that Jake (and Sawyer) ever existed.

“They’d crossed over to that continent where grieving parents lived. It looked the same as the rest of the world, but wasn’t. Colors bled pale. Music was just notes. Books no longer transported or comforted, not fully. Never again. Food was nutrition, little more. Breaths were sighs. And they knew something the rest didn’t. They knew how lucky the rest of the world was.”

― Louise Penny

I know that I am lucky too.  I am lucky to be Jake, the twins and Sawyer’s mom.