Journal Entry

May 6, 2022

People want to know how I’m doing.

The weight of this grief is heavy. It’s the heaviest thing a parent can ever carry. I feel it in my chest like he’s sitting right on it. But it’s not just my chest. I feel the heavy blanket of it over my head pushing down on my brows, my eyes, my cheeks and my throat. My legs feel hollow like they can’t support the weight of this. My muscles ache. My blood feels like it runs extra thick. There’s a hole in my heart that cannot ever be filled and my lungs fill up with extra light cool air that leaves me breathless and weak. I can never catch it. I hate this new life. My body and mind continue every day to reject it. Like if I deny it hard enough he can come back. How do you accept something like this? Every morning I wake up and rediscover a new wave of reality. That this fucked up life is mine. It is my husbands. It is my girls’. We don’t want this. We were thrown into a new life the second our old lives evaporated. I try everyday to make sense of it. Recreating every moment. Making up ways it could have been different. It’s like a snake eating it’s own tail. I try to make this sound like something we can live with but it’s impossible. You can’t move forward here. People say just breathe through this moment. Take it one breath at a time. But living is more than breathing. Living is making the most of the hand you’re dealt. Even I know that through this blanket of grief but it doesn’t matter. Living this life is impossible. So we sit. In this misery. In this suffering. In this pain. Until what? Something new happens? Until we figure out how to navigate, how to ”breathe through this moment.” But I don’t want to.

-Truman’s mom 💙💞💙