I Miss My Ability To Be Happy Alone

I lost a lot of intangible things the day my son died, but the thing I miss the most right now is my ability to be happy alone.

I've always enjoyed my solitude. In fact, even when I spent a lot of time around other people, I was seldom part of the circles. As long as I can remember, I've enjoyed being alone -- the silent companionship of dogs and books.

I don't enjoy that any more.

Instead I need people, noise, distraction. Sometimes I'm OK with the television or a good book, but sometimes knowing I have hours when I'll be home alone is terrifying.

I hate Saturdays because the girls don't come and my husband has been working until noon or later. The day stretches in front of me like a long, curving dark tunnel and there is no way to run through it to what I hope is light at the other end. It's me, alone too long with my thoughts and resisting the growing desire to pull down a photo album and give in to depression.

I hate Sundays. The quiet meditation of worship can send me to dark places, no matter how hard I try to follow the sermon. The hymns either fail to move me, or move me too much. The kindness of my church family sometimes helps and sometimes makes me want to flee in tears. Sunday afternoon naps for my husband leave me stranded on an island of loneliness.

A weekday without my grandchildren used to be a rare treat. Now it's a sentence to hours of alone time. Even just the baby, who gives me a long break during her afternoon nap, isn't enough of a distraction, despite the fact that she's more needy than her older sisters.

Weeknights, when the girls leave and the long hours my husband is working send him to bed early, are usually survivable with DVDs and shows that are saved on DVR. Still, sometimes I find myself teetering on a mental ledge and looking for someone to talk me down.

I no longer like being alone if I can avoid it.

When I'm home alone I feel like a small, dark shadow. I feel hunched and huddled against the weight of the world, wrapped around the shattered pieces of myself that I'm trying to hold together. Somehow I feel unsubstantial, as though a strong wind would scatter me like the leaves clinging to a maple in the fall.

I've found that I need other people much more than I did. I've admitted that need and found that I can reach out by phone or Facebook when I'm teetering on the ledge. Although I hate that any of us have to be here, I thank God that we are here together. When someone reaches out to me, I've found that replying to them helps me as well. That means that I feel less reluctant to reach out myself because I know the conversation will probably help heal us both.

There are also times that I recognize this loneliness may have been what Ethan felt so much of the time. Although he isolated himself and pushed us away, or escaped with his drug of choice, I still imagine that the times in between were often as dark and lonely for him as they are now for me. Just as I now miss him, I know there were times he felt that same hole in his being that I feel in mine. I know that reaching out, which he was unwilling to do, can help save me where it did not him.

I know that our ability to be happy alone was one of the biggest things that made us different as far as our personalities. He was unhappy with himself and needed the support of his peers and best friends and it was that craving for acceptance that helped pull him into drugs and addiction. I was the quintessential outsider, happier with my books, dogs and imagination than with any of my friends, and never driven by the need to fit in. I didn't recognize this difference when he was young and don't know that there was anything I could have done about it, other than to handle him differently. Still it haunts me that in losing him, I've become, at least temporarily, more like him.

No longer able to reach him physically, there is a part of me that understands him a little more now than I ever did in the past.

Still, slowly, I've been reassembling the bits of myself that were shattered when I received the call on Dec. 15 that my son was dead.

I'm sleeping a bit longer in the morning and making my way back from the yawning pit of sleep deprivation. My appetite is slowly returning, although I'm usually hard pressed to come up with something I actually want to eat. Resuming my exercise routine makes me feel a little more in control and both mentally and physically stronger.

Finding comfort in my own company still eludes me, but I'm hopeful it will come.

The Love that Broke My Heart is Free Now

I love Ethan more than I have in a long time.

No, that's not quite right, I love him more freely now, without the constraints I'd had to live with for the last seven years.

While death removed him physically from my life, it also removed the bonds of his addiction. Not only was he set free, but I was freed as well.

There's nothing as hard as "tough love," but for years that's the only kind of love I could allow myself to express. To love as freely as my mother's heart desired risked my sanity and safety and that of others I love as well. So although I loved Ethan with every fiber of my being and took every opportunity to tell him so, I could not express it in the way I wanted to for a long time.

I didn't realize how bad it was until I used his birthdate for a password the other day. I realized I had not done that for a long time because there was so much pain in our relationship. Just typing his name or birthdate on a regular basis would have been like cutting myself over and over. Now, because the ongoing emotional anguish of his life is over, even though I'm grieving, I can let that guard down. That string of numbers has a pure meaning now, not one that is as tangled and twisted as an angry black snake.

Not everyone who has dealt with addiction can understand that. Not everyone manages to achieve the level of separation that I had to have to survive. You see, I love Ethan but I didn't think I could survive his addiction. It wasn't just a matter of finding him high and that being hard to live with, it was the fact that his highs could trigger psychosis, hallucinations and violence. I feared my son.

People will tell you that the love we had for one another would have kept me safe, but they would be wrong. His best friend told me that the drug-fueled anger that drove them had no bounds and would not have been stopped by love, because love didn't have a place in those highs. My career in journalism had sent me to the side of a road where a man in handcuffs cried on his front porch because he'd finally snapped and killed his mother; it had taken me to the death chamber at Raleigh where I watched the life drain from another man who had been crazy on drugs when he chased his mom and stepfather into the yard of the home they all shared and gunned them down. It was a fate I wanted to spare us both when I made him move away.

While I missed his laugh, his jokes and his smile, I never knew which Ethan might be living in my house. When I took him places after he lost his license, I never knew which one would suddenly be in my car. I could never predict which innocent conversation might trigger an outburst, when my slowness to respond might provoke his anger.

I hate that I didn't see him more and yet realistically I know that I probably saw him as much as either of us could manage. Because we loved each other so much, our inability to be what the other person wanted hurt as bad as not seeing one another. We broke one another's hearts over and over again.

Yet, I always tried to answer when he called because it was my only chance to hear him. I always hoped I'd get the young man with some goofy story to tell, the one who was so easy to make happy and so full of love and caring. But sometimes I got a young man whose speech was garbled and whose words were full of pain and despair and who I often could not understand no matter how hard I tried. Sometimes I got the angry man that nothing could satisfy and my inability to say yes would end the conversation with cursing and a disconnect.

When we planned a family gathering, other than Christmas which still overrode his addiction to provide delight, he was just as likely to decide at the last minute that the safety and security of his walls was preferable to the love and hurt in the eyes of his family. Just as he longed to be with us, I know that at times we were just more than he could bear. I know his addiction took over and there were times that the only thing that brought him any pleasure was the drugs.

Loving Ethan has been a struggle for a long time. Losing him puts an end to the struggle, but not the love. I didn't love his physical body, I loved the soul that lived within. Now the physical body is gone, so I can no longer see, hear or touch him, but the Ethan I love is still part of me and always will be.

Learning how to live with that love and his loss is going to take a long time -- possibly the rest of my life.

Walking in The Valley of the Shadow of Death

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul; he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
Psalm 23

When I was a preschooler, I learned the 23rd Psalm with my grandfather's encouragement.

I don't know why he picked those verses, but I know as a reward I got to go into the nicest department store in town and pick out a dress. They told me I chose the most expensive one in my size and it still hangs in my closet, waiting to be worn by another generation of little girls.

Whatever his reasons for choosing it, that is certainly the only chapter of the Bible I could quote from memory; some of the few verses I could easily identify.

In the last three weeks, those verses have taken a different memory from what I always assumed they meant. Although they haven't changed in that David spoke of God as the one who protected and cared for him in all situations, my view of one of those situations has changed. In verse 4, I'm not sure if David was writing about his mortality which I had always assumed, or his own journey into grief because, like me, he lost a beloved son. I don't know about the history and how it lines up with his songs, but I know that I now read those verses differently than I did a few weeks ago.

To me, the valley of the shadow of death isn't where I go when I die or when my life is endangered, it's where I've been for weeks now.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

This verse has repeated in my head countless times since the call informing me that Ethan was dead.

My walk has been on a dark path because of the shadow of death. It isn't my death. It isn't sickness and the threat of my own mortality. The shadow of death is grief and it has changed the light through which I view the world. It's a shadow that adds a bittersweet edge to everything I do, a fear that some other next time won't come, that all my tomorrows will feel like today.

And yet, the Psalm reminds me to fear no evil, for God is with me and I will have comfort.

I've never considered myself a "good Christian," for lack of a better way to put it. God is as real to me as the sun that shines on my face on the hottest day of July, but I have lived a far from perfect life even when I knew better. I never thought I was favored by God, even when I managed to come through some of my dumber stunts unscathed. I never felt I had an inside track, because my prayers seemed to fall on unlistening ears as often as anyone else.

But as I've walked through the valley of the shadow of death, I've found out that God really is listening, it has been I who wasn't hearing. Time after time, when I've needed help just to keep going, the phone has rang, a song has played on the radio, or I've seen in my mind the answer to my prayer or felt just how wrong I was to let my feelings of despair consume me. I do not need to be afraid that everything is not under His control or that there won't be something to ease this grief.

I'm certain that skeptics would say I'm delusional and that the God I believe is caring for me doesn't exist or at the very least doesn't care. But coincidence is a term that I don't place a lot of faith in, and my life since losing Ethan has been too full of sudden answers and gifts of understanding. No, not the total understanding of why that I would wish to have, but an understanding that lets me accept the way my life has suddenly changed and keep on living.

I no longer see myself alone in this valley through which so many of us are walking. I see myself with new friends who travel the path of life under the same dark shadow. I see us all reaching out to one another and guided by the shepherding hand of God.

My Non New Year's Resolutions

I didn't plan to make any New Year's resolutions this year, not beyond trying to stay physically and mentally afloat for what I anticipate will be the continuation of the most painful year of my life.

After all, how could I look ahead with any big plans to a year that will be so filled with heart-breaking firsts? Certainly I couldn't think about the items people tend to put on a New Year's resolution list, because most of those things are meaningless to me right now.

Yet, I've found in reading some friends' resolutions, that there are things I expect from the coming year beyond survival. Things that, following God's lead and with His help, I should resolve to do in 2014 and all the years to follow.

1. Exercise my faith and grow my relationship with God.

As hard as it is for me to accept, Ethan's life and death had a purpose that I don't understand. I do not believe that it was coincidence that I had been blogging just long enough to have made it a part of my routine before Ethan's death. Some mornings I do not want to write, but I feel that is part of our purpose and the earthly journey Ethan and I made together. There are a lot of people hurting and if knowing they are not alone brings them the same relief that it does me when someone sends a message back, then I have to keep doing this. Many days it is my faith that God has a plan and this has to have a purpose that keeps me going.

But I don't want anyone to think that just because I seem to work through my emotions in black and white it's easy. It's not. I cry a lot. Sometimes it is just the sadness and sometimes it is anger. Instead of just crying, I have to remind myself to talk to God at these times and ask Him for help and guidance. The answer may be scripture or song or a vision, or it may be the sudden ringing of the telephone when someone has felt that was just the time to call. God answered my prayers and finally gave my little boy peace and healing. It wasn't the way I wanted my prayers answered, but sometimes the answers are unexpected. The answer won't always be so black and white and if I don't take time to listen and wait on God, I may miss the messages and healing He wants me to have.

2. Keep moving and living my life.

It's easy to get stuck in grief. I want to say especially the grief over losing a child, but while it may be more difficult to accept for a parent, there are many kinds of loss that we grieve. Whether it is a pet, a spouse, a parent or a sibling, or even a really close friend, it is easy to allow ourselves to give in to selfish grief. Our lives can become all about our pain and our inability to cope with it. We can shut out the people who still need us, the people who would help us, the people who are grieving with us. We can allow our grief and pain to suck the joy out of our lives and simply stumble through the motions of living. I know there may days when I feel I need to stop and let it consume me for a while, but anyone who God has chose to leave living has a purpose and it is not to sit around and feel sorry for themselves because of someone else's death. Those who are gone are free from pain and suffering and it's our place to live on.

The other side of that coin is to deny our grief. I know there are people who don't allow themselves to grieve because someone has to be the strong one in a family torn apart. Or perhaps grief can be avoided by refusing to accept reality -- especially for people like me who had a sometimes stormy and strained relationship with the one who is gone. While either of these choices may seem outwardly strong and at the very least as far removed from self-pity as possible, they still cut us off from human emotions and a human process that we have to embrace as part of living. They keep us from being emotionally available to loved ones grieving with us and they stop us from helping one another by learning to grieve and live on together.

For me living my life means picking up the threads of old routines that were dropped three weeks ago. It means digging out my knitting needles and starting a new project, stepping on the scale again, going back to my exercise classes, taking the girls back to Awana and gymnastics, planning activities for the future. Some of these things aren't as important as they were, and some have taken on new meaning, but they're all steps in moving forward and living again.

3. Help others.

This used to be simple, like stuffing a few dollars in the Salvation Army kettle, taking groceries to the food pantry in town, or helping to stuff food boxes for the holidays. It's not simple for me any more.

I feel there are too many people grieving the little losses of addiction or the earthly loss of a child and that too often we all feel alone. I promise to be honest and keep reaching out, even when it hurts. I want to help build a network of support where we can bear one another's burdens, love one another, encourage one another to feel not only the pain but the joy of living, and count on God for the final answers and help we need to get through the hard times.

4. Make good memories.

There have been times when I've thought that I wouldn't mind dying, but I want to live long enough to be a memory for my granddaughters. As they say, dying is easy, living is hard.

But the kind of memories I leave, the kind of memories I make every day are important. Although it's tough some days, I want to go to bed each night without a regret in the way I've lived the day God gave me, in the way I've treated the people close to me, or in the way I've reached out to make sure that family and friends who I don't see every day know what they mean to me.

---

So there it is, a simple list. It doesn't involve numbers on a scale or in a bank account; it doesn't involve kicking a bad habit or taking up a good one; it doesn't involve getting organized or a better job, or many of the things we typically put on our list of resolutions.

Even more importantly, it's not a list that will ever be checked off as accomplished. These are resolutions not just for 2014, but for the rest of the life God has given me live. It's not the life I expected or wanted a few short weeks ago, but it's the one I've been given. While it may pass as a vapor, it's my reality now and I intend to make the most of it.

I Didn't Tell a Friend -- Maybe Because She Wasn't

The other day in Walmart, I ran into a friend I hadn't seen in years.

That could be the beginning of a lot of stories. It is the beginning of a lot of traffic jams and sometimes aggravation for Walmart shoppers, but at the same time virtually everyone's path crosses at Walmart at some point. I once ran into the guy I had a crush on in the 11th grade at Walmart, which wouldn't be such a huge shock if he didn't actually live in Tennessee.

The friend I ran into on what was virtually my first time away from home since Ethan's death more than two weeks ago was carrying a toddler on her hip and asked if I'd seen her husband, which I hadn't. I was pushing a cart loaded with the youngest granddaughter while the older two were burning off some pent up energy by running up and down an aisle. Years ago, one of her sons and Ethan had spent time together at church and our homes. She drove the school bus that carried him to elementary school. We were members of the same church, although I haven't seen her there recently.

Do you want to know what we talked about? Would you care to guess?

We talked about babies. Turns out the baby on her hip wasn't her newest grandchild, but a little boy she's adopting. She wanted an update on my granddaughters. I held her little boy so she could go to the restroom (her reason for looking so desperately for her husband).

Neither of us mentioned Ethan.

I don't know why.

There is a very real chance that she didn't know, although it seemed that the news spread fast. We're not even Facebook friends any more, and I don't know that she keeps in touch with her former church family or reads the newspaper to see his obituary. I'll have to admit, if something had happened to one of her children, I don't guess I would have known.

But she knew my little boy from the time he was seven and the bus didn't come on the first day of school, because the boy who lived here before us was also named Ethan, and she knew he'd moved. She saw him every school day and at church on Sunday. He sometimes went home with her to play Nintendo with her sons. We sang together in the choir. When our children were older, we sat together and caught up on where they were and what they were doing.

Yet she never asked about him, and that omission tells me she knew, but just avoided the conversation. She never even asked how how I was, firmly keeping the door closed on that conversation. She may have been sorry that she bumped into me, and had it not been for the toddler and her need, she might have took a turn down an aisle before I spotted her.

I get that. Really I do. People think they'll upset you by asking. Talking about it will make me cry, whether to a friend or a total stranger, like the nice lady from Northern Hospital calling about the payment I forgot to send the week Ethan died. But not talking about it doesn't make the pain go away.

While I'm willing to give her a pass because I understand if she was reluctant, I'm still struggling to understand why I didn't tell her.

It's not that I'm unwilling to talk about it, or even that I don't want to examine my pain. I've discovered that I'm perfectly good at baring my soul when it comes to this. I've discovered that it helps me deal with and work through it. I've discovered that it's a whole lot better than pushing it down inside where it would simmer and leave me unable to help not only myself, but anyone else.

Her reluctance, or more accurately avoidance, I understand at some level. You don't want to poke at another person's pain.

Accepting my own complicity in pretending that my life is OK, however, is something new for me to deal with. Realizing that I'm not going to bring it up, even when it should be perfectly acceptable to do so, is something I'm still processing.

Yet, I know it's a common reaction. Out of my friends and acquaintances who I've known for years have lost children, there has only been one who would honestly share their pain and I know that honesty sometimes has people turning away. Honesty has a price that we may be hesitant to pay.

I think we also come to realize rather quickly, that some people we once considered friends aren't really. They shy from our pain and are eager to accept our lies when they're forced to ask how we're doing. It's amazing how quickly we can sense the sincerity in a question, and surprising who will turn out to be our true friends -- not necessarily the people we might have expected, but not only the people who understand our grief either.

Our lies and silence when talking with people who don't fit the bill for true friends are also an act of kindness and self preservation on our parts. I feel like I'm carrying around a big bucket of pain, and that I don't want to splash it on someone nearby who isn't prepared to deal with it. At the same time, although my tears are healing and never in short supply, I'm not sharing them with just anyone. Only people that I feel really care will get to see me cry.

Sleep Is My Elusive Friend

I chase sleep like my Labrador retriever chases deer in the fall.

Sometimes he is relentless in his pursuit, staying gone for hours and coming home with a happy, panting face. Other times he knows it's no use, they're already too far away and instead of bothering, he sits at the end of my driveway and howls mournfully. Sometimes I think the deer toy with him and he's not in the mood so instead he just stands and barks, looking into the woods.

He never actually catches a deer, however, so in that regard we are still different. He did wind up with a deer in the yard one day this week, through careful plotting and cooperation with several other dogs and perhaps coyotes, who stole two hunters' prizes from where they been hung during the night. Although he was fat and happy after the success, he didn't get to keep it.

While sometimes I pursue sleep and sometimes I sit and bemoan its escape, I do manage to catch my own sleep. But like Rebel, whatever means I use to catch it, I never get to keep it as long as I would like.

I have what I consider a healthy fear of lying in bed and not sleeping. My often tenuous grip on anything resembling emotional stability would be completely undone by a sleepless night, or even an hour or so of tossing and turning in a quiet bedroom. The past cannot be changed and no amount of mentally rearranging reality is going to bring my son back or give me a measure of peace. I know that it would, in fact, do the exact opposite and that once it began just a few tosses and turns might cast me loose without a rudder on a dark and stormy sea.

So I pursue sleep with a careful plan that most nights gets me into bed before midnight and quickly to sleep.

It hinges on not going to bed until I'm positively falling asleep on the couch, sometimes watching a recorded television program (so I can pick up later where I left off) and other times fumbling through a few games of Words With Friends until my eyes begin to slip shut. No reading, because reading never makes me sleepy, although the Kindle would allow me to read with lights off.

That transition to la la land is eased most nights with a glass of wine. Or on bad evenings, a couple of glasses. I realize I'm using a chemical crutch, but at the same time is it any worse than seeing my doctor for a sleep aid? I think not. Plus red wine has health benefits and I do use a 5-ounce glass.

Before enjoying my sedative, I take care of the whole bedtime routine carefully. I wash my face and change into my pajammas. I avoid Facebook and stay away from my blog because they can be emotional triggers. I cut off all lights at 10 p.m. to set the mood. I do everything but brush my teeth, which I do in a dark room, in an effort to avoid disrupting my slide into oblivion.

Some nights, I'm done before 11. Other nights I'm easing up on 12 before my eyelids are heavy enough to feel safe setting my mind free. But every night, despite my fear, I've been able to sleep.

Mornings are the hard time because I have no control over when my eyes will flutter open to still dark windows, a clock telling me the hour is far too early to be forced to begin my day.

While I'm used to getting up before 7, there have been many days in the last two weeks that I'm up before 6 and a few really desperate mornings when my internal alarm was triggered before 5. There's already coffee, (my husband has to be at work by 5) and as soon as I move most mornings my canine companions are ready to hit the back yard and see if they can scare up a squirrel or at least rattle the cage (literally) of my irritable rabbit.

I figure I'm losing a night's sleep every five to seven days and don't see any hope of gaining ground.

Because just as I chase sleep at night, I run from it during the day. Even before my sleep pattern became so disrupted, a doze on the sofa could easily spawn a sleepless night, even if my nap was a short one. I think I've managed one midafternoon snooze, and while it was desperately needed it still caused a delay at bedtime.

Hence, the coffee consumption that begins at whatever time I stumble out of bed doesn't end most days until dinner and sometimes later. I know I'm drinking too much coffee, but I haven't been able to find any way around it. That morning half-pot may be followed by a pre-lunch cup of joe if the morning has been really long. When nap time comes for the girls, I need coffee to avoid joining them, especially since only two of three usually sleep (even if I could nap without losing sleep, that wouldn't be a good option). Many afternoons I need at least one more to keep me upright until they head home shortly after 8 p.m.

Pretty soon after that it's time to decelerate, so I feel like I'm probably not getting really good gas mileage by always being on the gas or the brakes.

Still, despite the brevity of some nights, I have not had the sleepless nights I so fear. Sleep, my friend, always settles in at some point to keep me company for a few hours. While I still long for a morning sleeping in, an ease in the pervasive exhaustion that I carry like a weight across my head and shoulders, I'm relieved that sleep has not deserted me.

Sleep, although elusive, has not decided to abandon me to my grief, but each night gives me a few hours of total peace where not even dreams come to torment me. For that I have to be thankful.

I Can't Say Happy New Year

I have never been so glad to toss out an old calendar, to move on to a new year.

I'm under no illusions that changing the date on the calendar will suddenly make my life easier or my grief dissipate, but putting 2013 behind me is still a relief.

Although I could still cling to the magic of Christmas to carry me through that holiday, I don't think my new year's greetings will hold a lot enthusiasm, despite my relief in seeing the year arrive. "Happy New Year," no matter how many times I may say it, still feels false on my tongue. Happiness is a ray of sunshine that occasionally penetrates the gloom of a gray winter sky, and it's as welcome as those bursts of brilliance but often as fleeting.

Stumbling onto a blog about being depressed and facing the New Year, I found three recommendations: don't dwell on the bad/failures of past year; don't look at the new year as another dark mountain to climb; and don't go all crazy with expectations for a somehow terrific new year. I'm doing my best to avoid those three landmines although forgetting the "bad" of 2013 is impossible

At the same time, January, that long, cold, dark month, seems like the perfect time to grieve. Seriously, I've always hated January and for that matter February as well and tend to battle a bout of seasonal depression each year any way. My emotions will be in tune with the season for a change, but while that may make it easier to grieve, it may also mean I have to fight harder to avoid serious depression. Arming myself with that knowledge up front may help, as will the short few weeks that I've spent building a support network. I know who I can call, even if I've not done so yet.

So while I dread the coming month, I always do. I hate the long, cold, dark nights, the days where the weather cannot commit to sunshine or snow, the frozen water in the dog's pans, the chilly rain and omnipresent mud, the bundling and huddling against the cold. Perhaps I'll be able to focus on my total disdain for the weather outside, instead of the same conditions that often seem to take over my emotions as well. Perhaps by knowing that the winter will pass, I'll be able to mark off the days internally as well and heal, even if the process is a slow as the almost imperceptible lengthening of the days

Putting December and the first Christmas without Ethan away in my memory box is a step toward survival. Beginning a new year still dragging a gray blanket of grief and knowing that I face the a long series of looming "firsts without Ethan" is still preferable to being mired in the holidays and the month of his death.

Of course, when I take the time to look at it that way, I know the year to come will be filled with emotional traps hiding in my path like quicksand just waiting for an unwary step to pull me under.

Holidays, although the big one we celebrated as a family is behind me for a year now, will be minefields. Most were days he didn't seem to care about any way, be they Valentine's Day, Easter, or even Mother's Day. But April 14 will still be his birthday and my mother's and last year we were all together, clean and sober, and it will never be that way again. Even if we all avoid mention of the day, if there's no celebration for my mom, that reality will still bear down on me like a tornado in the spring.

But I have months to prepare for that, to somehow find a storm cellar that will protect me from what I know is coming. And being forewarned by every grieving parent I know, perhaps I can make plans to be far away and distracted on that day.

Realistically, though, I know it is something I'll have to get through, even if it is a day or two late and no matter where I try to hide. Ethan won't be turning 24 this year. He's trapped in youth, free from the aches and pains of aging in a body that should have been better cared for, spared the painful goodbyes of watching family and friends slip away, released from his addiction and our constant pleas. Like a prehistoric dragonfly preserved in amber, he'll live on in my mind a smiling, blue eyed young man of 23, even while his sister ages and I tick off the years on my calendar.

I dread his birthday and all the other days when I'll randomly think of him and miss him, but I know that the only thing that will ease this pain is time and learning to live with the loss.

Welcoming the new year is a world wide marker of time passing, of things changing, of moving ahead even I feel like it is with heavy feet still caked in the red clay of a grave in a mountain hillside.

I want to move ahead. I want 2014 to be a little better. I want time to heal.