My Chirstmas Blessing #5

 

I can feel their unasked questions.  People wonder how I can still stand, still walk, still laugh.  But they don't ask.  You can't ask that of a mother who has lost her child.  My son, Derek, died at the age of 23 years.  When people ask me,  "How ... are you?", that pause, that inflection, tells me that's really what they want to know.  How is losing a child a Christmas blessing?  Because he was a blessing; yesterday, today, tomorrow, and for the eternities.  I am grateful for the years that he was here yet somehow I believe that he is still here.  In that, there are blessings.

 

I am tempted to tell them that it is I who am lost, not he.  I am lost in my search for him, knowing he is nowhere on this earth.  And still, it would not surprise me if he were to appear by my side wearing his gray hoodie, eating the chocolate chip cookies that he so loved.  Sometimes I can almost smell his hair and his boyish sweat.  But when I look around, he is not there.

 

Sometimes my mind will invent stories.  He is traveling; playing with the rock band that he so wanted to be a part of.  I thumb through the pages of his music books and play a bit on his guitar.  "Where are you, Derek?", "Why did you die?".  Even that has no real answer.  He died in a single car accident on a rainy, windy road.  This cloud of uncertainty does not obscure what I know: My child is dead.

 

The instinct to protect one's offspring runs through mothers of all species.  I violated the basic canon of motherhood.  I failed to protect my child.  That my child is dead while I still live defies the natural order.  I dearly love my husband and other surviving children, but I couldn't transfer my love for Derek to them.  It was for him alone.  And so, for the longest time after his death, my love for Derek was as if my breath was taken from me.  So unbearable was my occluded heart that I called out to him in desperation one day:  "What will I do with my love for you, Derek?"  My eyes were closed in grief when suddenly I see him before me, his arms bent and lifted as if in question.  In my mind's eye, his face is filled with love and his smile a bit crooked, a common look for Derek.  "Just love me, Mama," he says.  "But where are you?", I ask.  "I am right here, Mama!", he answers and then he is gone.  I tell him that I love him.  I beg him to speak to me.  I beg him to come back to me.  And now, months after he died, I felt him before me.  "Just love me, Mama. I am here!"  His words unleash a torrent, my tears streaming and uncontrollable, I could and will continue to love him; here and in the eternities.  It is harder to do than I expected.  I see him everywhere, in every full moon, in each brilliant day.  In the sparkles across the snow that he loved and in between cold drops of rain.  Sometimes my spirit will soar in the spirit of his memory and sometimes it becomes stuck in the earth, taking every effort to pull myself skyward.  There are days when a weight in my heart makes each breath shallow and every step, painful and stumbling.  On the worst days, I sit and write and pour out my feelings to him, alone.

 

I will carry my child blessing for the rest of my life.  His golden curls and piercing blue eyes lives within me.  Others will carry him as they move forward with their lives.  He will  be with them when they look out to the world with compassion, when they act with determination and kindness, when they are brave enough to contemplate all the things in life that remain unknown.

 

As for me, I will search for my blessing, but without desperation.  I look for him in others.  My search is lifted by his words:  "Just love me, I'm here!"

 

So you ask me how the death of my child is a Christmas blessing?  It is because he is all around me and through me and leading me.  I see him in the eyes and being of my other children and to those that he made such an impression.  I carry on because ..

 

 

I ride the dark horse ..

 

 

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