Looking Ahead

I’ve had a lot of friends ask me how Easter was…our first without Chandler.

Easter was good. We celebrated that morning at St. Johns Church and celebrated that afternoon with our family and Board & Brew tribe.

I really didn’t anticipate Easter being one of the big ones. When the kids were little, of course, Easter was church, lunch, dyeing and hiding Easter eggs. As they got older, varying schedules for work or other events meant that we weren’t necessarily all together every single year for Easter lunch.

Today I found myself feeling some fear, a low level of dread, because of the holidays to come — the ones where we were always together.

If you ask me right now, tonight, I don’t even know if I want to acknowledge Mother’s Day. It’s one of those days when all my kids surround me and humor me by playing games. They write me words. I love their words. I can’t begin to imagine how I will feel when Chandler’s words are absent. I might just pretend that May 12 is not Mother’s Day. Maybe each of my kids, just this year, can pick a different day and take me to lunch or something. Or maybe this is just crazy talk, and I will snap out of it and allow Mother’s Day to be what it is. Just different. So very different.

Then all our birthdays — from June to September, with Chandler’s landing on July 2.

Thanksgiving.

Christmas.

I already feel a heaviness for what’s to come. I’m an optimist. It’s easy for me to flip a situation and see the silver lining, the best case scenario. But I would be kidding myself to think these days to come will not bring a whole new brand of pain. I’m on a ship in the middle of the ocean with news that a storm is coming. It’s coming for sure. There’s no magic escape route. I know that all I can do is hunker down and ride it out.

I pull myself back to now. That’s one of the ways I can honor Chandler.

Live in this moment. WWHC.