My grief blog entry for today. I always feel driven to write when I have kept quiet.
I choose not to speak, but then the silence eats at me later and comes out in writing.
Here is that which I was silent on today when a friend wondered why you would ever want a memory quilt, and what the hell it was. Until five and a half years ago, I hadn't heard the term either.
There was a lot I didn't know. But now...
I have a memory quilt.
Stitched with love and sadness
by the mother of one of my older son's friends
I have a memory quilt
It is not a happy thing
How I can sit and listen to talk of memory quilts
without ever sharing my thoughts
I do not know
I have learned to be silent
Not to be that grieving mother
Just days after Lev was gone I remember thinking,
"No, I don't want to be that mother."
I will forever be that mother.
I have learned to hold it inside
And let it out in private, bit by digestible bit
That is where the grief does best
In small amounts, alone
We go on, day by day,
Appreciating what we have
The people we have now
Lucky to have two living children
And the quilt. I appreciate the quilt
And I hate it
Right now I am mad at its existence
Metallica, Costa Rica, School, Earth, Vacations, Pearl Jam
A teenage life in t-shirts
I hate that it had a need to exist
How can something be so wonderful and so terrible
A memory quilt of a dead son's t-shirts
A beautiful thing
A thing you wish no one ever had
I miss it
I am here, thousands of miles away
As it sits in a basement in a trunk
Alone with other memory things
Baseballs, knives, photos, duct tape creations
Unable to hug it
An empty reminder of a too short life well-lived
The most beautiful, awful gift ever
My memory quilt
How I hate you
And love you all the same
I miss you
