Well, as my Dad always told me – or as I’m sure he would have, had blogging been much of a thing before he died – “If you run a blog on grief and your therapist gives you a writing assignment, well then, that’s a blog entry already written.”
So, this is what my therapist and I will be discussing during our penultimate session tomorrow:
The more I thought about why I don’t go into our guest room, the more I realized I couldn’t think of a good reason not to go into it. So, I decided to go to the source and spend half an hour in the room.
I thought I would catch up on emails. Instead, Noah showed up and wanted nothing more than a 20-minute cuddle, which was probably the best way to handle being in the room. So, I sat there, with my surviving son, saying nothing but looking at the room. We’ve changed some of the furniture around since Colin stayed in the room, but the posters are still up. Those are the posters I put up in a rush in 2019 when he was coming back from the rehab facility and I thought, since he would be spending a lot of time in the room, it would be nice for him if he had things to look at. Of course, since I didn’t have time to buy posters, I just put up old ones that we had. Looking at it now, I wondered whether he truly benefited from an old poster of Heidelberg or a National Geographic map of the United States. Did he ever even notice those posters during all those hours he spent in the room, since he so rarely slept? I think not, since most of his attention while he was in the room was focused on medical care, or playing with his tablet. I remember Christina set up a bird feeder at the window because she thought he might enjoying watching the birds. I think the minders got more out of it than Colin ever did.
I thought about how it must have been to lay there. I thought about the fact that he almost certainly didn’t understand anything that was happening to him. There were no traumatic flashbacks or unearthed memories. But it felt like dancing along the edge of a minefield. I think about Colin all the time and I can find a memory of him and his death forced by the strangest everyday things. And I guess that might be the answer: I’m so prone to thinking about him and what happened to him and the ridiculous possibilities that, maybe, some of it was my fault, I don’t see the point in going into his room or intentionally translating stories about dying children and diving right into the pain. It comes all on its own unbidden with enough regularity. Why go hunting trouble?
So, I’ll go into the room when I have to and I’ll translate stories about terminally ill children if that’s what the job requires. But I’m not going to seek out those experiences, because I don’t enjoy the sad memories. I’m just reaching the point where I can look at pictures of him and smile and remember the fun moments without having them weighed down by the awful events of 2019. I’ll take more of those any day. Why do something that will almost certainly dredge up bad memories when those come all the time anyways?
♥️