Butterfly Chronicles Volume 41: Hello Zach

Deliver us, O Jehovah.

Dear Zach,

I’ve been stuck, still feel stuck.  Writing is my way of “therapy-ing” through this situation, and I haven’t been able to make any sense with words.  I write and write and write, but can’t seem to write down what I need to get out of my head.

I talked with Nana Pony about it this week.  The split person I am.  Trying to knit myself back together where what I know is real and what is real is what I know, and I just can’t seem to find the right glue or thread or staples or stitches.  As another mother without her child said, “How do I believe the impossible?”  And not only how do I believe it, how do I live with it?

People mean well.  I know they do.  But I don’t live on the same planet with most of them anymore.  I’ve lost a part of me in a way that most people will never experience, and so much of what I know and feel can’t be shared.  I don’t isolate; I am just isolated.

I understand isolation.  I understand why it is necessary.  I like it.  It is easier.  Every day, I have to think about how much each step in a day will take out of me.  Leaving the house and grocery shopping takes 3 out of 10 unless I meet someone I know, and then it takes 7 out of 10, and I have to come home and be alone again.  Strange.  Very.  I’m an actress in a play I didn’t write. I speak and listen and share as if I am the old me, but I don’t even know the me who is talking.  I’m playing dress-up in my own life.

 

So, I plan things.  Carefully.  Like a doctor’s visit.  An hour to Houston, an hour in her office, moments spent trying to answer her questions, tell her about you without actually talking about it, and then receiving her tears, and I’m so sorry’s, and I can’t imagines, and you won’t ever get over it, and then an hour drive home.  A  10 out of 10.  Isolation.   Back to quiet.  Trying to write, to spend some of the grief on paper rather than in tears.

Today, Friday.  Lunch.  A new friend.  It’s all I’m doing, and I’m prepared so the take it out of me number will be low, and there will be me left to share with Madison and Taylor and Michael when I get home.  A new someone who will know me from now instead of from then and now.  Something new.  It is a step.

So much has happened in the near past.  Taylor’s a graduate, employed, has a boyfriend, is heartbroken but moving forward missing you all along the way. She inspires me.  Madison went to camp for a week.  Not once (at least that she would admit) did she get homesick.  She slowly grows up wise beyond her years. Life moves one day at a time.  Madison points out the butterflies – always.

 Madison still doesn’t talk much about you, but Gunner is common ground.  Hunting dog needs to run so we run him. One day I told her, as Gunner sprinted in and out and up and down and around and back again on the greenbelt, that I think you are happy that we are running him.  Zach is happy mom, she said.  Zach is happy we are doing it.  She asked me if Gunner misses you.  No, I said.  Gunner knows Zach is dead.  He came in the room that night and saw and smelled Zach. Gunner knows.  But I don’t think he’s sad.  Zach, I think Gunner knows he will see you again in heaven.  I think God does that for animals, to keep them from being sad. I think a lot of things I never thought before.

Zach, I can’t imagine what it is like for your dad to be without you.  I am a mom; how could I know?  How could I know what it is like to be a father without his son.   I see the pain and all this hurt all around because of you.  I just wish I could take it all on myself and give everyone a rest from it. Give your dad a rest from it.  We all need a rest from it.

Did you know, Zach, that this week you gave a gift to a friend .  You did that, and maybe God had it planned all along that you would gift a mother whose child didn’t die. It was a dead thing on a shelf until God said let it live in the life of another.  A good thing to touch what your fingers had touched and to let it live.  You gave a gift and you aren’t even here.

 Strange thing this life without you, but really you are everywhere - in our house in our minds in our hearts in the fabric of what holds us together as a family – everywhere.

So these are the days and moments and scales that I measure a life on now.  I try to live what is important.  Being home.  Hemming pants.  Making hotdogs.  Holding hands. Listening, talking, being.  I water my butterfly garden and wait for caterpillars and butterflies.  I want to live in the quiet.

I read my Bible.  I pray.  I wait. I wonder why God didn’t take me instead.  I think about what God is doing and why, and I know I will never know, and I hope that someday that will be okay.  Now, it just makes me sad.  Life is made up of moments, Zach.  Some moments scar and change lives forever.  We miss you.   And in all my sorrow, pain, self pity, confusion, questioning, doubting, fear, shame, guilt, and frustration, the butterflies just keep coming, and I say hello, Zach.  Every day.

I love you son.