Sad stuff...

It's just been a lousy week.

My in-laws and their next door neighbors have five horses and they share two barns between them. Last week, one of the neighbors' horses fell ill, and they ended up having to put her down Friday night. We kept the boys in the house all day Saturday, because we didn't want them to be outside when it came time to move the body. It was a very sad day.

Since then, the Boy has been asking a lot more questions than usual about my mom and her death...why, how, where, when. Those questions are painful, but relatively easy to answer. I can't bear to hear the questions about why she wasn't wearing her seatbelt, or why the Boy can't remember her, why she's not here anymore, whether she went to Heaven. I don't have those answers. He's asked about her from time to time over the past few years, but this week, faced with death, I guess it brought out some concerns for him. Then I had to tell him about Kelsey.

We did a little school shopping this afternoon. Hubs wasn't around to spoil our fun, so I let the Boy pick lunch (Sbarro), and then I took him to the ice cream store for a cotton candy cone for him and a cake carnival cone for me. My boy, my sweet, sweet boy, is licking his cone by the checkout with tears running down his face.

LA: What's the matter, baby?
Boy: That's another part of our family that died, Mama. Gone forever.
LA: Yes, and it's very sad.
Boy: Just like I'll never see Mamaw again. I'll never see Kelsey again.

Oh, I can't take it. We don't do grief in our family. I don't know why, but it's just never been okay to be sad. We don't talk about any of this stuff, and I think we've all suffered for it for the past three and a half years.

I've been suppressing the sad feelings over not having my mom here when Ladybug came into this world. She was, after all, the one who held my hand when the Boy was born. She helped me raise him, at least until he was three. She sang him the silliest songs. And I know those songs, too, but it just isn't the same to sing them to him, or now to Ladybug. It hurts my heart to think of what they're both missing. Of what I'm missing. Of what my brother and his new baby are missing. I've been thinking about it a lot this week.

I don't know how to help myself get beyond this, to a place where her memory makes me happy. Right now, every time I think about it, I relive the moment my dad told me, and then those days leading up to the funeral and the weeks that followed, the first Christmas, watching my dad suffer more than I could ever understand...It is a gut-wrenching pain that hasn't gotten better over time like I thought it would.

I have this boy who needs so desperately to deal with these things. His journal entries in school almost always end the same way...whether it's a pirate ship, or a school bus story, or a football game, whatever he writes about, the last line is almost always "And mom was sad and dad was sad because I died." This is the stuff that she left behind, and I don't know what to do for him. How do I help him when I can't bear to think about it, to talk about it? He breaks my heart.