My Name is Kris and I Blah-g

Ya know, I’ve approached this 2nd year differently than the first. During the first year without Mike, I looked towards all the “firsts” with dread, anticipating the pain associated with recognizing a significant event without him for the first time. In hindsight, I would say that I built it up in my mind to be worse than it ended up being. Yes, there were moments of sadness but for the most part it was survivable. I was quite proud of myself actually. Then the 2nd year started and I decided that I was no longer this widow newbie. I had a year under my belt. I had weathered the storm, so to speak and I was now going to be the one people could turn to when they had a loss of their own – become the voice of experience and the supportive shoulder to lean on. Then moments like today happen when I realize that I just may need a little bit more time…or maybe this doesn’t really get any easier. Only the span of time coping with it gets longer.Today would have been Mike’s 38th birthday. And I am not feeling poetic about how it feels. I cannot provide any prose that would inspire. All I can simply say is that today I am sad. I look at that photo above taken 3 years ago today and I am angry that Michaela won’t just be helping Daddy blow out his candles this year, she’ll be doing it FOR him. He should be here. He should be driving us crazy with all of his desires for the latest gadgets and telling us how old he is now. He should be letting us fawn all over him because today is his day. But the truth is that we’ll remember him, yes. We’ll be grateful for having been part of his life and he apart of ours. But in the end of the day, the reality is we’ll be eating a birthday cake without him and standing over a cold stark grave. And yeah, I will put on the brave face for Michaela later when we do all this but for now…here on my blog, in the not so private moments of my mind, I am going to share with the world this….You don’t get over death. So don’t even try when death confronts you. All you can do is learn to live WITH it. And there will be moments like these that will bring grief back with a vengence and remind you of all that is lost. And it will suck. It does suck. And it’s ok to let it suck.