One Year

To speak blog frankly; the following post is sad.
Tomorrow marks one year since my nephew's death.
If you're here looking for funny, don't read on.

I'll be back Monday.

I haven’t planned this post out enough to do research but it seems that one year is the unspoken cut off date for mourning.
I can’t imagine telling myself I can’t miss my nephew anymore. How can I tell myself, “Ok, you’ve cried enough. Dry it up, De!”
On Friday, February 3rd, it will be one year from the day my nephew died.
One year ago, on that Thursday night, I received a phone call that I’ll never forget.
It came at 10pm and by 1am I was riding in the passenger seat as my sister #3 raced down dark, isolated Texas roads to find our boy.
It was a boating accident, we were initially told. A boating accident and Rick was missing.
In my mind, I pictured him clinging to a buoy or washed up on the shore, waiting for the Coast Guard to find him. It was night after all; people were hard to find in the dark waters.
It was later, right before we left, that I heard a more accurate version: The boat got away from them; he dove in after it and never came back up.
That’s when I panicked.

We will never know exactly what happened on that day. There were two people in that boat. One is dead. The other is a liar.
I think, besides the obvious, that this is the part that is the hardest to deal with.
I have no idea what Rick’s last few minutes on this earth was like.
Did he know he was dying? Did he realize that he was drowning? Was he scared? Did he scream out in terror? Did he beg God to help him as the frigid water consumed him?
These are questions that I’ve refused to ask myself until now. If I think about it too much or for too long, I might just go complete insane.

Joan Didion wrote about grief in The Year of Magical Thinking.
I’m not sure if this year held magical thinking for me, unless you consider lying to yourself magical.
I’ve been able to convince myself that Rick is away at school or working on the wildlife refuge far away.
It’s only 3 or 4 times a day that something reminds me that he’s indeed dead and I will never see him again.
It never fails to knock the wind out of me, this harsh realization.
I literally have to pause no matter where I am or what I am doing. I stop suddenly and try to catch my breath. I fear my heart will either burst from my chest or shatter into a million pieces.
I try to pinpoint exactly what it is that I feel when I am grieving. Is it because I will never see him again? Is it because I’ll never attend his wedding or know his children? Is it because I’ll never get to tell them stories about him as a child?
Yes.
But it’s also because I can’t freaking stand the thought of him at the bottom of the bay, cold, lifeless.
I can’t bear the thought of him terrified, screaming for that other person to help him, while she did nothing but stand on a sandbar and wait for the next boat to come by.

I want so bad to think that it was peaceful; that when the water became too cold he simply stopped feeling and went to sleep.
I would give anything to know that for sure.

One year has passed and I’ve dreaded this day for nearly the whole year.
What will I do? I can’t pretend this day is the same as any other.
I want the day to be over. I want it to pass me by and I don’t want have to think of the next anniversary for a while.
As fast as this year as gone, I feel like these last few days have crept by like I was living in slow motion.
I would love to go to bed and wait for it to be over. But, I know that if I did, I just might as well die too.
The day after we returned from the refuge, after Rick’s body was recovered, I went to bed and didn’t get out for two days.
I didn’t shower, I didn’t brush my teeth and I didn’t eat.
I lay there, praying to God to let this all be a nightmare. Please let me see Rick one more time. Please, I begged him.
I couldn’t do that again. Getting out of that bed and facing the reality of it was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. I couldn’t do that twice.
Watching my sister go through this is the second hardest thing I’ve done.
If this is how I feel, I can’t even imagine her pain. I don’t even pretend to and I think she appreciates that.
She hears a lot of “I know how you feel.” And she hates every single one of them, even when they come from someone who has lost a child.
No one knows how you feel.
No one knows how I feel but I hope that Rick knew and still knows that I loved him so much.
I was so proud of him and I admired the hell out of him.
He was a good boy and he grew into a great man. No, he grew into an amazing man. How we share DNA, I’ll never know.

A few weeks after his death, my sister (his mother) used his Bible to look up a passage. She found that he had marked this particular verse. The truth and the foresight of this Bible verse shook her and has become something we try to draw comfort from.

Isaiah 57

1 The righteous perish,
and no one ponders it in his heart;
devout men are taken away,
and no one understands
that the righteous are taken away
to be spared from evil.

2 Those who walk uprightly
enter into peace;
they find rest as they lie in death.