My Will Surives

Roll over.

Throw the blankets off.

One foot on the floor.

Two feet on the floor.

Walk.

I will myself to start the day, because that is the hardest part.

Soon, the girls will wake up and I'll be too busy to notice that I am grieving, but I will feel it with every step.

Though some days are harder than others, not a day has gone by since this day 9 years ago that I haven't struggled just to keep living.   I wonder daily what right I have to breathe when my son cannot.  I wonder why I simply couldn't take his place and give him, with all the potential of a new life, the opportunity to live.

But I did give him life.  I carried him, even under circumstances where most women wouldn't, and every single day that I carried him I knew he would be something special.  Even when those dreams shifted, even when I knew his life would be short, I knew it would be meaningful, because he was unique, his own person, with his own destiny and his own purpose in life.

Some days those thoughts carry me.  We aren't promised a long life.  Not a day is guaranteed.  It's cosmic.  It's scientific.  It's the way things go.

Other days - today - I can't understand how the world keeps spinning, how the sun goes on shining, why business is still conducted, why people still drive the streets and still drive like such assholes and I hate them all, every single one of them because they dare to be on the road with me on this day that the world ended yet still somehow went on.  How is my heart still beating with this tremendous hole deep inside of it?

Nothing makes sense.  My baby had just started moving; how could he be dying already?  My son has died; why am I still alive?  My heart is broken; how can it still love?  My daughters are healthy and thriving; why isn't my son?  The world ended 9 years ago today; so how is it that life has gone on?

Determination.  Hope.  Gideon.  Will power.  Promise.  Whiskey.  Noelle.  Clients.  Mock Trial.  Marcos.  Eden.  Delilah.  Spring Training.  Love.  Every day I search for a reason, and every day for 9 years I have been able to find one.  I search for the reason, I will myself to start the day, I get through the hardest part.  Life is hard.  It is fragile.  It is unfair and imperfect and sometimes it's short.  So I take every day I am given.  I take every day because my son only got ten of them, and I take every day because I pray my daughters have thousands of them.  I take every day, the weight of Gabriel's death weighing deep in my bones, bleeding from my heart, eased by the hope that I will see him again some day.  That is how I get by in this post-apocalyptic world - Finding the beauty in what remains, and hope in what is to come.