Today is Dad’s 81st birthday.  I was walking at the mall this morning and a smallish man was walking ahead of me, built quite a bit like Dad, baseball cap on, and if I squinted he could a sort of might have looked like Dad.  But not really.  Funny how I keep looking for him.

A week or so ago I was corresponding via email with the mother of a young woman named Channing who was killed in a crash a year ago.  She was struggling at the one year anniversary with the fact that she felt worse now than she did at the time of the crash.   She also said she felt bad that she had been “taking” and not giving anything back, as she knows we have suffered a similar loss.  This is what I wrote back to her.  I didn’t mean it to run on the ways it does, or get so philosophical, the words just came.

“I don’t think it’s unusual for it to be more difficult for some people after the first year.  I think at first you’re running on adrenalin, getting through the first day, the first week, month, first holiday, first birthday without them.  And sometimes you think that if you can survive the first year that it will all go away.  But it doesn’t go away and that causes you to be even more depressed.  Because you start to believe that you’re facing years and years and forever feeling just like you feel right now, and you feel pretty horrible right now.  And the pain is so intense that sometimes you can’t breath and you can’t imagine not being able to breath for the rest of your life.  And you feel hopeless and you want to crawl away somewhere and cry forever.

But I’m here to tell you that though the pain doesn’t go away entirely, it will eventually recede to a manageable level.  I don’t know if the pain actually moves away or if we just learn how to manage it better.  Your counseling sessions with your family, if led by someone you connect to, will help you learn, will give you hope, will teach you tools to make some days better.  And then a few more days will be better.  And someday you will laugh about something and you will be surprised because you don’t remember the last time you laughed.  And then you will fee guilty.  And than later on, maybe days or months, you will laugh again, maybe even at a memory of something Channing did, and you will realize that it’s alright to laugh.  That you’re not dishonoring her by being happy.  Her life is not discounted because you have moved beyond the pain.  That making yourself stay in the pain is not going to bring her back, and that the way to honor her is to do good works, tell her story,and love her forever.

Someday you will be there, I promise.  And then you will be able to take some newly injured family and hold them close to your heart and they will say, “we’re taking but we’re not giving.”  And you will know that they are in fact giving, they are giving you the opportunity to do something good with your pain.  And then you will have completed the circle.  And Channing will smile.”

I tell you this, dear blog readers, not to tell my story all over again, because I’ve done that here many times, but to let you know how much I appreciate your patience when I head down this road again.  Because it’s here that I can lay the pain and let some of it go.  For whatever reason, if there is something sad hanging onto me and I put it down in writing it loses some of its hold.  And though I know that it’s not fair to spread that pain among all of you, especially those I’ve never met and aren’t related to, it does help.

And so I thank you for reading and listening and caring and helping me remember my Dad.  On his 81st birthday.  Tonight.