Today is your birthday.  You would have been 35 today.  You should have been 35 today.  I lie in bed in the mornings when it’s still too early to get up, and I think of you, peacefully. In my mind I talk to you, tell you how much I love you, how much I miss you, how sorry I am for you, for all of us, that your life is over.  I do that at night, too. Somehow in the dark you don’t feel so far away.  But come the light of day, it’s a different story.  Reality slaps me across the face when I least expect it, and the grief and loss shake me to my core, again and again.

I wonder if everyone feels that they grieve alone, because we all grieve so differently.  I know I feel alone.  Everyone else goes about their day, business as usual, or so it seems. My days consist of trying to get some work done and not being all that productive.  I write letters to you, which, if I’m honest, is probably more about writing letters to myself.  And I cry, alone.  I think we all cry alone.

I’m going to miss the man you would have become as much as I miss the man you had already become.  I think you would have aged well – mellowed, probably a little on the eccentric side.  Still a seeker, feeding your soul on input whenever and wherever you happened to find it – work, play, family, friends, music, art, travel, food…life.

Watching you grow old would have been one of my greatest pleasures.

Happy Birthday, my 34 year old son.  I love you.

“My grief and pain are mine.  I have earned them.  They are part of me.  Only in feeling them do I open myself to the lessons they can teach.” – Anne Wilson Schaff