I spend most of my life with sadness buttoned up inside me, a scarf wound tightly around the lump in my throat. When sorrow seeps out through the gaps I add more buttons, another layer, another piece of armour. But it’s a tenacious beast, grief. It won’t be quietened, it won’t give up.
Some days – days like today – I am just too tired to fight it. Too weary to push it back where it belongs, too weak to pretend I haven’t noticed it. I sit, and I weep, and I wait for it to be over.
Today I am overwhelmed by it: this sadness which lives inside of me every second of every day. It exhausts me.
I know it will end. Alex was born on November 5th, and he died on December 10th. I know that once that date is behind me, I will feel stronger and more able to button up the sadness and wrap myself up in a cloak of artificial cheer, ready for Christmas.
But for now… oh how it hurts! To know that for these five weeks I had a living, breathing son. A son who looked at me, who clutched my finger, who was everything I had ever wanted. If I shut my eyes I would be able to feel him still in my arms: I cannot bring myself to do so – it is more than I can bear to open them again and find him gone.
I know there is nothing to do but to live through it. To crawl my way through the sadness; to battle the wave of grief which engulfs me. And to hope that tomorrow will be better.