Today would have been your fifteenth birthday. I’m currently exhausted from fighting off a cold your older sibling gave me last week. I find it increasingly hard to imagine what life would have been like with you, instead of the life we have, full, and joyful, and rich, and meaningful, but built around the profound absence of you.
Because loving you has become a great joy. I think of the way my life has been shaped by the fight to save you, my journey back from a close call with death, the immediate aftermath of grief. Losing friends who saw my absolute rock bottom as indulgence, and having to completely reimagine my worldview, building an understanding that could encompass a loss so profound, and also building a future that could support the idea of you, and a chance of happiness.
There isn’t much I can say that hasn’t been said. But you are still loved, maybe not as deeply, richly and viscerally as if you were here, underfoot and loud. But your absence means that this relationship exists purely in memory and imagination, and there is beauty in that too.
Disco Knitter 