On My Son’s Birthday:

I sit in a morose puddle of misery. Today is my sons birthday. This I only tell you because he is dead and has been for a number of years.

‘The Shining Son’ was twenty five years old when he died in a car accident. But today I am remembering the birth of my first child so many years ago. I was young and life had so many promises in the offing for me. The greatest at that time, being the promise of my life force continuing beyond my meager existence with my first child. “It’s a boy!” The first grandchild. The first to make my siblings into uncles and aunts. My parents into grand's. A happy day that now has gone bitter sweet.

The day passes with a hollow feeling. No balloons or cake, no games and music. No friend and family. Just another day. I dress with care to go to the cemetery. Fresh flowers for the vase in his head stone plaque. My child is gone and we cannot touch. There are no best wishes and many happy returns to this day anymore.

I lay on the ground with my cheek pressed to the raised lettering of his name on the brass marker, my tears watering the new grass. Time moves on and we are left in limbo, alone my child and me. I still want to scratch my way through the earth and hold him in my arms once again like I did on the day we buried him there. Instead I talk to him.

Cemetery visits are not a new thing for me since his death. I have been visiting cemeteries since I was a child myself. I have always felt at home in one. I grew up with a cemetery just a half a block away from my house and spent a lot of time growing up by sitting and reading, drawing or writing stories among the head stones there. I have no fear of cemeteries.

But on this day my visit is hard for me. No amount of blow ticklers or candles change the fact that master death has taken him from me. My child is not with me in the flesh to exchange ideas and move into the future with. I do not feel he is totally gone from me but he is not here in a way that we can talk in the ways we once did. He can not play video games with me or tell me what he thinks of a new song on the radio. He will never be married or have children of his own. The promise of my life force moving on into the future with him is gone. That light has gone out and today I am in the dark alone for my child’s birthday.