48 hours

48 hours ago I did not know that my son was lying cold in his bed. I did not yet know the gut-wrenching pain that restricts my chest, twists my insides and empties my bowels. 

2 days ago I did not yet know that his pain had exceeded his tolerance or that he wasn't in pain any more. 

The day before yesterday, I knew whether I wanted a cup of tea and what I would do tomorrow. I took pork out of the freezer for dinner and I knew what would become of the stack of frozen pizzas sitting next to it. Today I suspect that neither the pork nor the pizzas will ever be eaten by anyone.

In the life before, time passed in a predictable way. Hours felt like hours and a day lasted 24. Now a minute can last for eons, an hour disappears like fairy dust and the day after tomorrow is an unimaginable mystery too distant to touch. 

Tuesday I only knew his sweet face that so easily broke into the most infectious smile I've ever known. I hadn't yet seen it contorted in death. I only remembered the feel of his warmth, the way his body felt held against mine, as only a mother manages to do with a 17 year old boy. I hadn't yet felt it cold and unresponsive. 

As the third day approaches and I lie in the dark awaiting the second dawn of this life after, I begin to recognize a new traveler in the journey. Next to grief there is a new feeling. Mingled with the tears of loss, there are tears of relief. 

In choosing a path I would never have chosen, Ryan ended a struggle that was always his and never his alone. For a decade and a half we've been in this pain together. We've worked and searched for an elusive way forward where joy and contentment were possible. We've looked for a life free of pain where he could run and jump and laugh, where survival did not depend on escaping first into books and then into video games to numb the pain. He and I together clung to hope for healing, for a different life, until this week he lost his grip and, hopeless for a life he could stand to live, he simply stopped living. 

As the second dawn breaks and the third day begins, I recognize a new reality in which I am no longer searching for elusive answers. I will not go into the kitchen to make a breakfast he may not eat. I will not sit across from him hoping to find the right words to give him strength and courage enough to take the next step in building his life. I won't knock on his door hoping that his conversation will find at least a moment of connection, unlike hundreds before in which he remained distant from life and from me. 

 Ryan released me from the impossible task of finding an answer that would make him whole. After years of special diets and parenting strategies, therapies and weighted blankets, Ryan has set me free from the search for an elusive key to an ever-tightening lock. 

I am relieved. It is the most excruciating relief imaginable. I'm forced to believe a truth I've been fighting his whole life, the truth that the very best I had for my son was not enough. Still, it is a weight lifted, a final gift from a loving son who always wanted me to be happy.

I wouldn't trade these years of mothering Ryan for the motherhood I had imagined it would be. Loving him has been the hardest and most important work of my life. Grief is part of the loving. Loving and grieving are all tangled up. I have for years fiercely loved the child I had while grieving the motherhood of my expectations, the one in which happiness is as simple as pancakes for breakfast.  

Note: though published somewhat later, this piece was originally drafted with pen and paper by moonlight in the second night.