Friday, February 21, 2014

Ain't No Sunshine When She's Gone

About a week and a half before Cassie died, her friend Dakota asked me, out of the blue, "Mr. Logan, what are you going to do one day when Cassie dies? How are you going to handle it?"

I answered her honestly and replied "It's such a sad, scary, huge thought that my brain can't process it. When I try to imagine life without her one day my mind just goes blank."

And that's where I am. I am blank, and empty, and simultaneously brimming over with a leaden anxiety that sits on my chest like a blanket of bees, waiting to sting if I dare to take a deep breath. Which will get me first, the lack of oxygen or the bees? I don't know. I know that I never could have imagined how much I miss her. Nothing can prepare you for how it feels to lose something, or someone, until they are really gone.

Some days I get up and function. I do what needs to be done. Other days I try to sleep as much as possible because I can't get through a day without her there. The ache is too great. I look in her room, at her bed, and still I can't accept that I will never kiss her forehead again, hear her laugh, I'll never again wake up to hear calling out to me that she needs me. From my bedroom, across the hall from hers, each day when I sat up, I could see her feet. Each day I sit up and look across the hall to that empty bed, and my arms feel so empty. I know everyone tells me that I will manage to cope with this, that it'll become bearable one day. But those days are somewhere on the other side of that blank slate, the endless number of days I have to wake up and feel her absence before I've barely opened my eyes.



1 comment:

Elisa Hanson Casey said...

Logan- the death of a child is something so completely horrific and unfathomable that there is not even a "name" for it. Someone who (typically a child) has lost both parents is called an "orphan". A person who loses a spouse is called a "widow".

At the viewing for my beloved who died from injuries he suffered in a motorcycle accident, his father said something that has stuck in my heart, soul, and mind. "It should be ME in that box, not my son." Pretty close to a direct quote. And I suspect he would have given about anything in the world to switch places with the son who was his name-sake.

I'm not sure that time ever truly heals those wounds... but as with physical injuries, scar tissue forms that sort of protects the damaged tissue underneath. And it is those scars that allow you to keep going even when you think you can't.