grief | themaxjourney

I have become accustomed to tearing up in the strangest places these days. Sometimes with fair warning and other times with no warning at all. It’s not that I’m out of control, but that I will be so caught by a memory, by a moment, by a reminder I connect with so deeply and that raw emotion just emits forth.

Over a year has passed since max passed away, and I don’t know how I feel. I don’t know if I’m supposed to be through the grieving process, if I’m supposed to be healed and whole. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be, but I’m here. I’m at this spot. An unidentifiable, unmarked place, desolate place. Somewhere between a complete wreck and completely healed, that’s where I am. The pain still stings, but less than days in the past. My eyes still fill with tears of sorrow, but much less frequently than before. I’m still a broken man, but I am walking a bit taller than before.

I am more optimistic than before, and I think that’s a good thing. Hope exists where barren fields of despair had taken up residency. It’s not that the hurt is gone, but it no longer consumes. The pain is no longer the central focus of my days.

The greatest honor I can give to Max is to live my life with passion, with hope and with purpose. To live a life that honors who he was, the role he played in my life and with the spirit that he lived with.

I am no longer what I once was. For years I was the parent of a son with cerebral palsy, the parent of a son that I pushed day in and day out in a wheel chair. I was a man gutting out life, playing the cards he was dealt… scratch that, embracing the cards he was dealt. I am not that man anymore, I’m not going through life like that anymore. I see the parents pushing their child in a wheel chair, and I emotionally take a hit as I think of myself in that same position. Yet I know that’s no longer my journey. The news cycle ticks on, day by day getting further from those fateful hours. Life has taken a new rhythm, but the wounds are still fresh and raw refusing to become scars of a battle once waged.

I march forward cloaked in countless memories, I was shaped by those years, and I was broken in that moment when those last breaths were taken. Which leads to the molding process that takes place today. Death takes its time until suddenly it doesn’t. The emotional wreckage scattered and strewn about, and the cleanup brings a man looking into the darkness. Into the darkness of anger and the internal hollowness such loss surely brings. I was most scared of losing myself in the darkness, falling in so far that retreat became impossible. Alas so far so good, as I believe I have kept from losing myself through this chapter of my story.

Over a year has passed

No longer what I was