When you lose a child, it is like having swallowed hard every day. There is no getting away from that, no getting away from the sadness it brings to a parent. I know parents with this particular heartbreak and how devastating it is over the rest of a parent’s lifetime. I know the pain that must be following my fellow grandparent Roger, father of Courtney, my son’s wife.
I wondered at one time where to go when the pain comes on. So, I built a place, a place of where hard labor is needed to construct it and when I finished it I dedicated it to my son, Joseph. It sits outside my dining room window, surrounded by a fence on two sides and the house on one side, yet it opens to the street, to the World so he can look out and be included in everything Earthly.
Today is his birthday, he would have been forty years of age, entering middle age and maybe have had a family with little to older children, who knows? I often think the same thing about my daughter, but life deals some hard cards for me to play, but play them I have to. But both Ellen and Joseph remind me that it is one day at a time, look to do what I can today and hope for tomorrow.
Each day I awaken, there are many reminders for me to play and use to keep me remembering the little boy who suffered. I remember when one day, one of his final, he was rushed to the hospital at North Shore University Hospital and I got there to find him still on a gurney waiting in the ER, he saw me and reached for the bottom of my tie and held it in his little hands, then looked up at me wondering what was happening to him.
No, I will never forget him, he will be at my side when I go.
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