Today’s May We All Heal prompt is Life & Death. I wasn’t particularly interested in the prompt when I first saw it, but thought I might tackle it when the time came to write. BUT here I am and I’m still not feeling it. Sort of weird how a single idea can be off putting to you for no apparent reason. Instead I decided to check out A Year of Journaling Through Grief and pick one of the prompts there to choose something close to the original prompt.

Remember, it’s perfectly okay to go off path with these prompts. May We All Heal is to help you with exactly what the title says: healing. Do what’s best for your heart, mind, and grief.

Today’s prompt: Do you think your grief will ever end?  Why/why not?

Needed, tired, introverted.

(I just want to point out whenever I specially feel this way, I sort of brush things to the side instead of working through them. Feels like a little gain I’m making today.)

This is Jensen. He is my firstborn. I’ve never shared this picture of him. Every morning when I wake up, I think of him. When I go to sleep at night, I think of him. Throughout the day, there are reminders of him and all I wished he could have been. He died, in my belly before even having the chance to live like you who is reading this. And to those who are reading this and have lost a child, I think you know the answer to the prompt above.

When a person gets pregnant, they’re already bonded to the child inside them. Fathers bond with their son or daughter as well. This bond is a little thing called love. We plan to love our children, no matter what happens, until the day we die. It doesn’t change if they die before us.

Many people describe grief as love that has no where to go. Maybe they are interchangeable in this circumstance, but grief feels more complicated. For me, the initial reaction is always love. Then there’s a lightening bolt that slowly travels to the depths of my mind and begins a grief attack. They’ve evolved and changed since those beginning days and it’d be ignorant to say they won’t change as I grow older and experience new things.

Do I think my grief will end? Absolutely not.

I think it’ll become more manageable in the future, sort of like it has now. There will be different things that trigger me knowing what he should be doing. I’ll always want to know what he looks like or what his interests are. There hasn’t been a time where I would wish I couldn’t give him a huge hug. And I know when I’m an old lady (hopefully) and know it’s almost my time, that I’ll be happy and one I’ve waited all this time to see him.

My grief will be with me till the end and there’s nothing wrong or weak about that.

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While I was writing this prompt, I kept thinking of a drawing by Mari Andrews that I thought perfectly described grief. It only took me ten minutes of scrolling to finally find it, but I had to share it with you… especially in this post.