On My Grief:

I don’t know if it is the fact that it was so unexpected, or that it was my child, but I had expected to find it a little easier by now.

My son was killed in a car accident on the evening of July sixth, eleven years ago.

He sat in the back seat of a car leaving an ice cream stand. They hadn’t gotten more then 200 feet when hit head on by a van. They were covered with uneaten ice cream and blood.

The driver survived because she had an air bag. And doctors worked on her for days to keep her alive. The front seat passenger and my son, seated behind the driver, died on impact.

He had a closed casket because his head was unrecognizable. He was twenty-five years old.

The terror filled nightmares have all but stopped. I haven’t gotten a mysterious coin in a while. I don’t break down weeping any longer at an unexpected song, turn of phrase, or look-a-like as I move about the world.

But a stinking hot day can still break me down.

We withered in the heat of a heat wave at our separate locations, as we talked briefly that day on the phone, about a TV program scheduled for that night. He stopped me as we closed to tell me, ‘that I Must Understand, that he Really Loved Me.’ Something he never did with costumers in earshot. It was all ‘Dido’ and ‘Yeah, same here’ when he was at work.

Having the time after work and before the program, he and some friends went for a swim at a local swimming hole, then stopped for ice cream on the way home.

I got a call a few hours later and didn’t get home from the hospital until almost five in the morning. I stood, in shock, doing yoga exercises to get centered before making the phone calls to tell his sister and the rest of the family that the sky had indeed fallen and that nothing would ever be the same in the world again.

Today it is stinking hot and I am reliving the worst day of my life and it doesn’t get any easier.