Fall

My favourite season, maybe because of the orange color everywhere. It also feels like the season for closure. All the growing is done, it’s time to reap the fruits of our labor and prepare for the quiet, dark and cold days when one feels like fuzzy pajamas should be the only attire allowed.
Our summer has passed in a haze of tears. With fall the answers to why should have come, but the coroner’s report simply stated; “natural cause-pneumococcal meningitis”.
But when we looked up description of this disease we know that Sara did not exhibit typical symptoms that would have given us early warning about what was to come. The statistics also state that this is by all accounts very rare disease. Only one to two cases per 100,000 people a year…that is only 350-700 people each year in the entire country. Out of those affected only one in ten dies, so each year only 35 to 70 people in our country die from pneumococcal meningitis. All these have preexisting conditions that leaves their immune system compromised. They might be under two years of age with weak immune system or elderly. Sara was perfectly healthy eight year old…
What was supposed to be the answer brought in more questions. Three months of life without Sara seems like an eternity. Each day starts with tears and end with them as well, we still take turns in crying, most of the time. In my mind the feeling of her forehead under my fingers, the softness of her hair that I would feel when laying down before she fell asleep, is disappearing and I’m scared one day it will be gone. It feels so long since we hugged for the very last time.
It’s almost comical how the state of our house so closely resembles our lives now. Sara’s room is full of stuff from our living room, building materials and mementos from the past months. We can’t reach her bed and lay in it. We subconsciously don’t allow ourselves to be there, because laying in that bed alone is the ultimate proof that Sara doesn’t exist anymore. Walking around our house we can pretend she is upstairs, but when her room is empty at night all the pretense is gone and tears fill our eyes.
We have been renovating for almost three months now. Building new life for ourselves, our new, different, family. So far so many things were finished only to be undone, replaced, improved. In our everyday life we are finding ways to cope with the reality of our situation. We walk forward only to sidestep or walk backward the next day. They say grief is not linear, it doesn’t get better progressively. We are expected to move on, but how do you move on from loosing your second grader in just one day? No one moves on, we only learn to move forward. We teach our bodies how to function with a big hole in our hearts. This hole makes everything so much harder and we frequently gasp for air when tears unexpectedly fill our eyes.
Just like today. I went for a little road ride, for a moment I felt “normal” my grief was hidden somewhere deep in my brain only to resurface with a sight of fuzzy teddy caterpillar on the road. Sara loved those creatures, she collected so many last fall, put them in a jar and marveled each morning how much they pooped at night.
So I went on, continued my ride at my own pace, bursting into tears every 100m or so with each new caterpillar appearing on the road surface. That is my life nowadays, I can’t move on, but I try to move forward.