The 2nd year

So the famous first year is over, the year most people kind of expect to be difficult or at least different. You´ve gone through his first birthday without him, the first holiday, the first Father´s Day and the first Christmas. You´ve gone through all the seasons, shifting from winter to spring, not seeing him get out shoveling snow or plant something in the backyard. It´s shifted to summer without him BBQing and the first Christmas night came and went without him reading the Christmas gospel. The first year is expected to be hard - everywhere - in other cultures wives would dress in black or wear something black on their arm (sørgebånd) the entire year, but then what? What happens after that? Does it mean that things turn back to normal and stop hurting?

Well, talking to my friend that lost his Mom 18 years ago this February, he says: "It never becomes easier! It just doesn´t!" That sounds horrible. Unbearable. If it will stay like this.

Or maybe, as others have told me, it will always hurt, but it does change. The pain will change, the intensity, or the time between the pain will get longer and further apart, or it will be open wounds turn into scars you look at once in a while - and remember.

Maybe the truth is that I won´t know. That it is different for everybody. But that it will mark your life somehow one way or another.

So I kind of knew what to expect the first year. But the 2nd? I don´t. How will the 2nd Easter feel without him? The 2nd birthday? Will I feel the pain of it more often or more seldom? How will I learn to live with something like this and build new foundations in life? You would think I´d be done talking about it by now, having a whole year to process. But actually I feel like I have just begun to cry out what´s inside and barely even started talking about him to others. That there is so much more in there. It´s not finished after the first year. It only just begun.


And - still - even in and through all this - life is beautiful and precious.