I’ve been very aware this last couple of months that time is getting away from me. Dates and numbers playing on my mind.
Dates that I don’t want to contemplate or have to reach. Dates that are also some of the most relevant, meaningful points in my life’s worth and dates that I have to face to be able to heal, even a little.. or at the very least be able to just survive the coming of them year upon year.
This time last year we had fought long and hard to get Corry out of hospital and into the warmth of our home, knowing that he would die and that we desperately did not want for that to happen in hospital. We pleaded for his right to die with love and his comforts around him, not knowing how or when that might be. Knowing full well that we would be taking on a whole load more risk and responsibility over him and his very fragile health. And that we did. We came home and spent 2 very challenging, love filled, very emotional months at home in his beautiful presence, and that I am grateful for – but Inevitably, this time will always be hard.
It was the time that we had to watch as our son slowly faded away before our eyes. It was a time we had to be in our home together, looking at ourselves and our belongings, things we had made and shared together and have to realise that our time together was almost up. Our lives as we knew them were over.
I could never explain to another the hurt at having to let go of the battle for your child; the time we fought, having then to admit to yourself that the specialists were right, that your child will die, no more fighting for them, no more pushing for treatments.
It’s was not a release. It felt like giving up, and that’s something I never, ever wanted to do where he was concerned. I never, ever wanted to let him go, not even when I had to.
Over the next two weeks most children will be going, or have gone back to school. I will be packing up a lunch box and laying out school clothes for lily, knowing that this year I should have been doing that for Corry, too. He should have had a brand new blue and grey uniform with his school emblem proudly on him, heading off to be with his peers, learning to read, write and be able to play. I should have been trying to snap pictures of him in an oversized jumper whilst he walked into the playground looking way too tiny to be leaving me already.
He was too tiny to leave me.
He was just 4. 4 years old, and at the end of this month, he should have been turning 5. We should have had a 5 year old boy on the 28th of September, excited about ripping into the mound of presents awaiting him and doing his goofy arm dance that we used to love, whilst we sang to him a happy birthday and wished him another year of happiness and love.
Instead we will feel even more so the empty space he has left, on the day he was given to us, as we also rapidly approach the upcoming whole year that he will not have been here.
A whole year that I have somehow managed to continue without him. Our humorous, cheeky, loving, friendly, warm, bright and skilled Corry.