It’s easy to run away from the pain. It’s terribly hard to walk towards it. Since the death of my son, I have run as fast as I could away from the pain. Any chance to travel or take on new projects is something that I have readily jumped on. I’ve always loved traveling, helping people, and teaching people, but now it’s taken on a new emphasis for me. For those sweet hours of the day that I am head down in work, I am not thinking of Bennett. The minute I stop, is when the weight of the loss hits me.
Being busy is the only thing that keeps me from thinking about him. When I’m not busy, my mind runs in a constant loop. A loop that is never of “what ifs”, because his death was completely unpreventable, but rather of “what could have been”. There is a place in my mind, in my soul, that was the outline of a little boy. A little boy that was just waiting to be colored in. Now he’ll never be colored in. What was supposed to be the outline of a beautiful picture, is now the chalk outline of a dead boy.
Yesterday, my wife and I attended our first infant loss support group. Even work could not keep me from thinking about Bennett. My head hurt the entire day and I could barely eat or drink a thing. I was all in knots because I knew that by the evening I was going to have to walk into a room and face my pain.
I wish that I could say that I feel better. I don’t. I actually feel much worse than I did the day before the infant loss support group. I wish that I could say that I look forward to going next week. I don’t. I dread it. Most importantly, I wish that I could say that my son is alive. I can’t. He’s dead.
No matter how hard I work, no matter how busy I keep myself, no matter how good and attentive of a husband I am to my wife, my son is still dead. I’m not sure what to do. But I know that I’m not handling the loss well.
What I do know is that burying my head in work to avoid pain is like an ostrich burying its head in the sand to hide from a predator, asinine. In fact, it’s even worse, because my burying of my head hurts my wife. So what can I do?
Well, what I can do is simple, place reasonable limits on how much I work. Will I do it? I’ll try.