Grieving Ryan

It's not that grief is intolerable in itself. I would guess it's a lot like my friend who lives with chronic pain. It hurts. It's there. Sometimes it flares and takes over life for a time, but mostly it doesn't. What it does is make everything harder. I'm less good at the things I'm good at. I make the mistakes I make more often. I'm slower to see them and it's harder to fix them.  I feel it most in the space of relationships. My emotional capacity is depleted. Also memory and task management, probably the whole bucket of things they call "executive function".  Of course it lands hardest on the one I'm closest to. Jamie is more with me than anyone has ever been. He pays attention. He cares. He spends hours and hours with me every day and holds me through the night. From the beginning, our relationship has been characterized by deep connection. It happened naturally at is sometimes does when you find your match. Even more, we worked at it. W...

Ryan loved games. At two he could beat me at Memory (the card matching game). By 3 Grandma determined that he was not only smart, but also insanely lucky. He drew more Sorry cards than three other players combined and reveled in their strategic use. He joined the advanced homeschool chess class at age 5 and generally beat opponents twice his age. He didn't care about winning actually.  He loved the strategy of it.  In Carrcasonne he was a spoiler because the most intricate strategies were for taking castles and meadows away from others which often did not result in ending up with the most points. He just loved the puzzle.  Ryan learned basic math facts by tallying Monopoly properties. We covered probability formulae and thus exponents when he asked which of two game scenarios would be more likely. He'd played the game at a friend's house and I didn't know anything about it, but he was still noodling days later, so he asked Mom. He loved to figure out the best possible p...

I think this is guilt. This heaviness that pulls at me when I think of the life I had before and the life I have now.  Three years ago Ryan and I moved into our new apartment, the one he chose. He helped decide where to put the furniture and carried boxes up the stairs. It was a space where we could make a life together, and we did. It wasn't easy for all that we loved each other. We had different ways of living. Parenting teens is never simple. Connecting with Ryan was particularly hard.  Yesterday I walked out of that apartment for the last time. I thought of all the life that happened there. And the death. I remembered the pain of being unable to connect with him both before and after he stopped breathing. I remembered meeting Jamie in that same space and thought of the joy and partnership in my life now, of the ease of living with the man I love.  Who wouldn't choose the easy joy of newlywed life over the struggle of raising a depressed teen? A mother wouldn't. I didn...