Eight Months

Oh, Max. You are gone. You are still gone. This realisation - the one I've had a million times now - still takes my breath away. The pages of the calendar turn ever faster and not one of them has brought you back to me. I could slap myself sometimes for my stubborn belief that somehow you still exist, and that if I only look hard enough I will find you again. Perhaps you are not dead, but only lost, a word which has all the promise that I might find you again. Sometimes I get this rush of panic that perhaps I've left you at the supermarket, or forgotten to pick you up from the hospital. I still live with the residual hope that someone, somewhere, has made a terrible mistake.

I don't know how we ever expect children to understand the concept of death; it's forever-ness, when we can't even make sense of it ourselves. I'm 34 years old and still I can't quite believe in a forever without you. Eight months I've managed. A year I can only just contemplate. But the idea that you will still be gone, as gone as you ever were, in all my imagined futures is simply one that my mind, or my heart, absolutely refuses to contemplate. Your mum is stubborn like that. You might be dead, I think, but like hell you are staying that way.

I stare a lot. A lot. I can't stop looking at other people, doing the things that 'other' people do. Yes, often their looking after babies or wrangling small children. I look a lot at the mothers. Sometimes they are doing what I used to think were ordinary things, like doing a crossword or reading a book or grabbing a coffee on the way to work. I'm still stunned that they can get up in the morning and do these things. Now, my first thought is, 'while you are doing that crossword someone else is dying'. Or, I see people dropping their children off to school and I think 'how can you spend even a single day away from them knowing that it might be one you can't get back, that it might be the last time you see that child'.

This is evidence of a pathology of extreme anxiety, I realise that. No one can parent; indeed no one can live with that level of morbid fear on a daily basis. It's debilitating. But I have this feeling a lot. I don't want your daddy to go to work as that's one less day I will get to spend with him, and then one day he might die, and I'll wish beyond measure that I could get that day back. All of the things we spend our days doing seem so meaningless in the face of death. It's no wonder I can't set my mind to doing or achieving anything. Everything falls so short in the significance states. Nothing but staying alive, and making sure everyone I love stays alive, and that I don't waste a single moment of that time, is all that seems to matter.

It's not like this every day anymore. But still on a lot of them. Some days I feel really hopeful and motivated. I make lists of things I want to do with my life. I send emails. I organise paperwork. I arrange outings. But then, I'm just as likely to wake up one day and wonder what the hell I was thinking, what the hell does it matter. It is like having a split personality. It's exhausting.

Oh Max, you're gone. You are still gone. And soon, dreadfully, you will be long gone. Eight months has brought a world of distance between us. How will eighteen months feel? I want the time to stop. I don't want you to get further away. I don't want you to be only a memory, I want you to always be in my present. I want to be able to say 'I held my baby last week', not 'I once held my baby, a long time ago'. The passage of time seems an extra cruelty to bear, shipping you out into the night where I can not follow.

I cannot follow. I cannot follow any of this. . .

I love you. It's the only thing that's any longer true. I love you.