My Left Shoulder

Sometimes early on grief consumed my whole body. My legs gave out so I couldn't possibly stand. An emptiness formed in my gut as solid and dense as lead, balling up in my belly and forcing its way into my throat where finally it could be released in sobs that wracked my whole being, only to gather again the next minute. Or hour. Or day. 

Sometimes still grief consumes my whole body, but more often now it persists quietly in my left shoulder where it has lived for years.  It is the physical memory of the weight and shape of his head.  

When he was very small, barely out of his crib, he arrived each morning, warm and still sleepy.  He climbed into my lap, nuzzled his head into my shoulder and snuggled into his day. That was before I knew, before the tantrums began to tell the tale of an unhealthy child. That was when my sweet blonde baby was in perfect health, save a bit of torticollis no one was concerned about. 

As he grew he arrived on my shoulder by a different path. He no longer needed it to start his day. Instead it was his place of safety and respite when the world wasn't working for him. Held tightly against me, he settled out of a tantrum or avoided one. There he escaped the strains and stressors of the world and regained himself. When I felt the full weight of his head pressing into my shoulder, his body melted into mine, I knew we were safe from the rage that could consume him and the chaos it caused. The simple sweet weight of him told me we were at peace. I happily held him for as long as he'd let me, sometimes carrying him like that on hiking trails or around amusement parks. The strain in my arms and back didn't matter beside the peaceful sweetness of his flesh poured into mine.  

He outgrew it of course. As a teen he no longer wanted the comfort of my shoulder and I no longer got the pleasure of his body melting limply into mine.  The ache in my left shoulder began. 

It wasn't until he stopped that I realized how much I had depended on his touch. For that wondrous decade his growing body satisfied craving for human connection that I didn't know I had. He grounded me. As I carried his body, he carried me. The symbiosis of mother and child. 

If only I could have carried him still. If that head could rest again on my shoulder, quieting the demons in us both. Perhaps he would still be here. Perhaps the ache in my shoulder, the ache for the soft blonde weight would not be there.  Perhaps. 

Photo Credit: Ashe Kazanjian