She Was Still Looking for Him

She was so big when he was killed … and so little. She was still reaching out and calling for him. It breaks my heart. Widowed parents grieve for their loss and their child’s loss.

Two years later, little has changed. It’s like he just died yesterday except now she has more words than ‘baba’ and ‘dada.’ Now she talks about missing him daily. She talks about ways she can get him back. She also tells me it’s funny that he likes poop. (We are in the stage where poop is a favorite topic.)

She doesn’t even know that he got an extra hour with her on that last day because he was waiting to poop before he left for work, so he let me go for a run.

This morning she said something about kids who want their daddy’s to come back, but don’t know how.  She didn’t fee

This isn’t right. It’s so wrong I can hardly see the light of life.

Hours before the anniversary of his death, while writing I realized that I was not going to have to relive his death that night, that I wouldn’t wake up at 4:00 am to find him gone, that I wouldn’t get a call at 7:00 saying he had died from a gunshot wound, that I wouldn’t get a call many hours later from the police saying he has been murdered. On the anniversary of his death, we breathed a weak sigh of relief that we had journeyed two full years forward. We survived.

But surviving is not enough. I trust that life will win over death, that good will triumph over evil, but we are still in darkness two years and three days later.

We have some major changes coming in the next few weeks that I cannot talk about until they arrive.

I think it’s time for a change in focus. I’m hoping we can change our goal from surviving to living, from treading water to getting back on shore, from making it through the darkness to finding the light.