Lavender Blue

instead of just wishing the suffering would end, that I found a way to move forward. For me, that meant taking Liam forward with me, too. He’s not here physically, but that doesn’t mean I can’t share my life with him.” She smiled more fully then, even as she blinked away a few tears. “I guess you could say he’s like my guardian angel. I want him to be watching over me and feel happy to see what I’m doing, how I’m living my life. I work hard to be the person, the mom, the whatever, he’d want me to be. Maybe that’s nuts, or weird, but I also gave up caring about what my choices looked like to anyone else. If I’m finding a way to live a life that feels good, honest, and positive, then that seems like a healthy outlook to me. It’s a livable one, at any rate. And I’ll take that.”

began making those memories about him, not about me. I told myself it wasn’t fair to remember him and be sad.” She smiled. “He was a great kid, flaws and all. He deserved to be remembered happily, joyfully. He’d want to bring me joy, not pain. That should be his legacy, you know?”
Will nodded, and his gaze stayed on hers then, as if he was holding on.
“Once I started to think about it that way . . . well, I won’t say I began to heal, because there is no healing. Not really. You can’t expect to get over it. Nor did I want to. I don’t want to forget Liam, or never think about him. This is who I am now, this is my life now. So I had to find a way to live life and keep him in it, but in a way that was good and positive. It was when I started to figure that out,

Sometimes it still overwhelms me. You saw that up close and personal. But most of the time, I can look at things through his eyes. Remember how much joy he took, like in the example I just gave. Instead of seeing through my sad, grieving lens, I started looking at life through his. How much joy he’d taken in swinging on those swings, sliding down that slide. And I’d hug that joy so tight. Revel in his joy, his laughter, remember all the good and wonderful things he was. Honoring that, honoring who he was, instead of honoring my grief, my loss.”

I started trying to live through the avalanche of memories that seemed to bombard me every waking minute of every single day from his perspective, not mine. For example, I used to see kids playing and I’d get hit by this wall of crippling grief, realizing that I would never get to watch my son play like that ever again. A cavalcade of images of him would assault me—that’s what it felt like, a physical assault—of Liam laughing, Liam playing, all the most beautiful images of him that I would never be able to add to.”

You can’t just suffer through it,” she told him. “You have to let yourself feel it, and find new ways to think about what you’re feeling, so you’ll eventually be able to recall past events in the context of what they meant to you then. If it was a lovely memory before, you need to find a way to remember it as a lovely memory now. Poignant, yes, heartbreaking even, but honor the lovely part, and in time, it helps mitigate the heartbreaking part. At least, that’s how it worked for me. Not everyone processes things the same.”