I'm sorry I've been hiding, avoiding words feelings and you. I've made it 531 days without Dex so far but nothing much has changed from day one, other than the shock wears off some days causing panic to rise in my chest when my body tries to work through how to save a little boy that's already gone and I have stopped talking about him as much as I'm thinking about him. This is the second year he's never lived and it's now arrived.
Life is ever-changing and ever-moving and yet despite this, I'm very much stuck in 2022.
With the start of 2024, I can't with good conscience celebrate yet another year that arrives past my child's life, I can't fake another social occasion, the 31st of December is a day I willingly let myself off and allow myself to feel as I feel without the pressure of pretence.
I have long been obsessed with mythic creatures, folklore and the craft, dragons have illuminated my dreams and the wish to have my own has long been an ambition but as I grew up, the dreams of having a large family, an army of tiny humans in my corner overtook and brought me greater joys than living in fantasy worlds, although I still write a lot of fantasy.
Today marks the start of the year of the dragon, 2024, the second year Dexter and I won't share, another year I will have to learn to mask myself and be what society expects of a grieving mother. Now the ' firsts' as people say, have passed I'm expected or at least told (on the regular) will get easier. I may be an anomaly, something I doubt greatly, but the cliches of time being a healer has proven very much the opposite to me and probably to all the mothers who have experienced the loss of a child, time is not healing it's the enemy.
I started writing this post on the 1st and now we're on the 9th. I just haven't been able to focus my mind on writing, for over a year. I try to write things of worth but much like this post, I deliver muddled rambles after Dexter's death. He consumes much of my thoughts and I really need to write his story to allow other stories and worlds to talk, build and live in me, but currently, I can do neither, unable to face the truths of the past four years or the future without Dex, the future days of this wretched new year that's just cracked open.
Time moves further and further from a time when Dexter lived and breathed, he is fading in the minds of others but he is ever powerful and consuming in the minds of his mother and father, his siblings and close nit loved ones but there is always a struggle between society and its understanding of grief, it puts distances between us all and the old lives and loves we once had are stranded in veiled unreachable memories.
My overstimulated vagus nerve tightens and aches with fresh heartbreak every day in my chest. It's a true physical pain related to the feeling of heartbreak I have over losing my son, other people don't feel it, they don't feel the scars of loving dex. I'm the only person in this whole world who has a weak right hip, nerve damage from Dex pushing his head into the right-hand side of my pelvis while I grew him, carrying Dex for nine months he left me with something that plays up every now and then and now I see it as a gift, a marker to prove he was real and he was mine. Those are my pains and mine alone.
I haven't written here for some time, not because last year wasn't jam-packed with distraction, travelling and achievements for my children and loved ones but because when my mind and body longs and hurts for Dex, I can't write. It's the first part of me to be blocked. Creatively I become a husk of a person, my creativity is so impacted by grief, grief isn't an emotion I have to manage like the array of others as I thought and read about, it's embedded and hard-wired into my personality. I am ok with it, I am comfortable with the sadness and the darkness. I live happily with the intermittent pain because the pain is a physical reminder of my undying, overflowing love for Dexter.
I personally think that is why a griever can only go so long before their personas crack, causing pain and sorrow to spill out for an episode, a day or a weekend. Whatever time frame it may be. Love is building up in an internal 'glass', capturing the subconscious pangs of love that drip like a tap, capturing it all until the glass overflows and the love has to come out, like a nail bomb, disrupting and leaking over every other corner of your life.
Again I'm okay with it but it's hard for others to feel it and understand the power of it, not even I understand the power it has over me, its something I try to control in quiet moments, at night, in the car or when I'm not with people, but sometimes I crack open by the smallest of comments or gentle reminder, it can't always be controlled.
November, just gone I felt a slow decline in energy. Halloween set me on a loathing path, having to celebrate it without Dexter, it wasn't the first Halloween or Christmas without him, it was the second and yet it hurt all the more for it.
Dexter died July 27th 2022 and I think even up to the anniversary of his death I was in a state of shock. I wasn't aware, but in 2023 it all hurt with much deeper cuts and the isolation. I felt ruptured from the friendships and family relationships I normally lean into. In roomfuls of people, I was detached and drifting in my mind making it difficult to anchor to the present. I feel like I'm an observer of life now, touched by death, it has pulled me from the normal triviality of life's enjoyments, yanked me through a thin veil and now I'm not truly part of some things, slipping back and forth. between two realms. I am never sure when I will be able to partake or have to stand on the sidelines, observing in a swell of sorrow, it's not a choice when the death of a loved one consumes you.
December I was trapped in the veiled sorrow. I had to watch my children with a layer of sadness draped over them, continuously trying to claw my way back through, but the membrane was unbreakable and eventually, after having to give up heavy drinking and eating, I attempted to take care of myself a little better and in the second half of December, I think I participated to an unjudgemental level, a class' A' performance for the masses, sensible me.
I pride myself on my efforts as a mother, I dress my house, host events and do everything to impress my children, I do it all for them and also because the Home Alone house had such a big impact on my growing up. I wanted to bring magic to my children, every Halloween and every Christmas. I always loved the togetherness and the love of it and now I struggle to do it without Dex but I tried my very best.
Dexter was like me, he loved and adored everything about the events, he was flamboyant and enthusiastic and he loved the costumes, the lights, the decorations, the parties, Santa, the movies, the nativities, the concerts, the gift-buying, the gift getting and above all, he loved doing it with me. Where his siblings would drift off with friends and other things, he would stay and watch every movie with me, help with every tree and tell me endlessly how much he loved it and how he loved his family more than anything in this world. I loved hearing it because it made me feel like a successful parent and we were such a close family, looking back I had it perfect.
This Christmas it was difficult because I attempted to keep Dexter's memory alive by celebrating with beautiful moments, hoping that he can be remembered positively, not in ill health or how it all was during the end.
I had Santa visit and give out presents with the money I wanted to spend on Dex, but now I spend it on his friends and the people he loves. I don't believe he doesn't love those people anymore, because we still love him.
I tried to deliver all the magic I did for Dex every year, to all my other lovely children. Ignoring the discomfort and pain that was wrapped around me. I tried to deliver magic this year and I did it from the 1st to the 25th and like every mother around the UK I'm exhausted by it, exhausted because I tried hard and exhausted because I had so much of my energy pouring into smiling, getting dressed up, socialising and plastering the picture of happiness across my face. It's exhausting when you care about nothing more than carrying your family through the hardest of times but it takes everything from you. Jack struggled, he could barely be himself all December. He was exhausted by a year of hard work and distractions to pave the way to coping. I often worry about the boys in my life, quiet brooding and intense, only small moments arise where they drop their guard and allow the pain and loss to touch them.
I have tried for a whole year and more to embrace the small things I can still do for Dex, I can raise awareness for the truth about the NHS's system, the treatment and rhabdomyosarcoma, the quietly observed cancer that doesn't get enough attention because there aren't enough cases. I can keep his name on the tip of people's tongues and ensure he's in their thoughts.
However embracing traditions that aren't our own, the day of the dead for example, brought closeness to our family and helped us process that we aren't complete without Dexter and it's for us, to feel closeness with him, whether he reciprocates or not. I put a dragon memorial in our garden for Dexter, so we could dress and have a place to feel close to him and the place Dexter loved most in the world was being at home with us, so that's why it's with us. Because Dexter was ours, and it's a struggle to share him after sharing so much of him with everyone in the last years of his life.
I would like this new year to be more productive than 2023 felt but in reality, I set up so many coping mechanisms to remember and include Dexter in our lives, so I feel like I can still be a mother to him even in his absence. It was productive. At Christmas our trees were filled with dedications to him, there were still presents under the tree for him. We still get little mementoes and surround his urn on family outings. Quill wears his jumpers, and the kids all sleep with his beloved dragons and striped tiger Sasha. There isn't a moment we aren't moving through our lives without him in our thoughts, on our minds.
It hurts me when I see his classmates and friends, all turning ten this year, and it hurts me when I see their achievements and their lives so full and vibrant, I wish them nothing but good fortune in their lives but I hate that after such a valiant fight Dexter is unable to stand beside them and be allowed the life he also deserved.
I am weeks off forty and as a grown adult woman, I comfort my broken heart with stuffed dragons and cottage pie because it was Dexter's favourite things. I wear his name and drawings etched into my skin and jewellery adorned with his name on my limbs, a new year means so little to me now, it just represents the second year of living without someone who deserved to be here and is so loved.
Trying to love Dexter after the universe severed our communication, I have to rely on the fact that despite not hearing him, holding him or seeing him his energy, his soul, he is part of me and our connection isn't severed and I will continue this year doing anything that makes us feel closer to one another, to heal even a slither of the rift that's torn through our lives, I don't think any year will truly be a happy one now we are without Dex, it can be full and have happy moments but for me, sorrow and melancholy will forever be there. Every year I'll think Dex should be this old and living these moments and every year he won't. Frozen in a time and space, that will ultimately forget my precious seven-year-old, lost in history after being robbed of a future.
My heart feels after having someone so precious and then losing him, as a mother it's just not recoverable, no new year will fill me with ease and contentment ever again. In year two the pain doesn't hurt less, the love doesn't sting less and the memories of all the trauma around his fight don't fade and I don't want to grow so old that he fades in my memory. I want him to be immortal and entombed in literature, whether it be in the fiction of Achroma as the Master of Dragons or as himself in a story to honour Dexter himself, with no biological presence of his own in this world, where his siblings with have bloodlines. I want words to accompany Dexter's legacy in a world where I no longer exist after the afterworld has claimed me, letting me follow Dex into the unknown darkness. So my goal this year is to write those words for him and I'd like to share them with the world, so the world knows what it's lost.
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