The seasons are changing.

You know those days?

The days where the breeze plays softly on your face and the sky is amazingly azure in colour.

Perfect golden apple days, so crisp and clean.

Days when you can feel that change coming, days where old memories whirl around you, kissing your cheeks with tears of rememberance.

With the change of season comes the focus of grief.

It’s June. I can hardly believe it.
This year, I am doing it all by myself.

Unmedicated.

Uncounselled and it scares me.

To my very being.

Already, I can feel that familiar wave of grief rising, looming larger and darker until soon…

soon I will be engulfed in dark thoughts and memories of a boy who never was.

Or who barely was.

The tears, hot and uncontrollable have already started to betray my soul to the world. In shopping centres and in paediatrician’s rooms, for goodness sake.

Some days I am angry.

Angry with him for leaving me

but mostly angry with myself.

Wanting so badly to move forward in this journey but also wanting to hold the memories tight, to not let them spill into my everyday life but to capture them, clasp them in my hands, like a frantic butterfly beating its wings to escape, to freedom, to feel and accept that powerful drum and to know that soon they will still and calm and once released will drift fleetingly into the sunshine, no one the wiser to the pain that was felt.

No one but the butterfly.

One day it might be like that.

One day.

For now it is the change of season, the change of life as I knew it, the change of me.

March. So beautiful. Dappled sunlight and emerald green as far as the eye can see. Promises of burnt amber leaves and glowing russet sunsets.

I can feel the winds starting to build, and build they will, until they eventually feel as though they are moving through me, making my soul a part of their hurry into April.

April is so many things. It’s life and death. It’s beautiful and in the same breath it is terrible. The most horrible, intense kind of terrible. The terrible of outliving your own child, of watching his life spark, dull and then completely extinguish.

But April is also a time for allowances.

A time to forgive myself and think of him fully, with abandonment. To ache for him.

A friend wrote tonight one word: Crysalis.

She knows.

She has walked the same path of grief.

Crysalis – ever changing, evolving. That is what grief is like.

Accepting the journey is almost as hard as embarking upon it. Embracing it, harder still.