My youngest is already older than Dylan

My youngest is already older than Dylan was when he died. I don't need a birthday to tell me that. Dylan died three weeks before his 9th birthday, my youngest is now just days away from that same milestone.

How can this be?!? My youngest has, at 9, outlived his older brother. Even my bloody car has outlived Dylan!

I can't even explain how this makes me feel. Sad, devastated, heart broken? No, none of these are adequate. In fact, I think there needs to be a new word in the English dictionary. Something to describe the utter, lifelong, devastating despair that accompanies losing a child. Its like a knife through the heart that you can't remove, can't live without and can barely endure.

You see, there is this quote:

When your parents die you lose your past. When your spouse dies you lose your present. When your child dies you lose your future.

This really resonates. I won't see Dylan turn 12 on his next birthday. I won't see him graduate primary school in July or start secondary in September. I won't watch him grow, develop, find his own interests. I won't see him fall in love or marry, or enter into a civil partnership. I won't see him have children or forge a career or make a life for himself. That huge part of my future is missing.

But, hopefully, I will get to see all of this with his brothers even though, with every milestone they reach, the knife twists just a bit more. A bitter sweet reminder that Dylan has gone.

Birthdays, special occasions and celebrations of any sort are already hard without Dylan here but, this one already seems insurmountable.

The last time we put a '9' candle on a cake and sang happy birthday it was to an urn. Its a lovely urn, a wooden box tastefully decorated with a spiderman scene but, its an urn! Its not, and I can't tell you how much I wish it was, an excited, happy, beautiful boy. Its an urn!

And now, in just a few days, I get to stick a '9' candle on a cake and sing happy birthday to an excited, happy, beautiful boy, not, like last time, to an urn.

This is where I am struggling. I don't want to. It's as simple as that.

I don't want to do for one what I couldn't do for another.

I couldn't throw Dylan a party, watch him excitedly open his presents, watch him blow out his candle. All I could do was hold back the tears whilst I sang and presented a cake to an URN.

We have sung happy birthday to this urn three times already. That's three birthdays Dylan has been gone.

Grieving is hard. Everyday. It's not something that you can pick up and put down when it suits. It hasn't got any easier with the passing of time. Some days are inexplicably harder than others, some days, like birthdays, you already know are going to be hard.

As a singe mum to young children, I have limited choices when it comes to managing my impossibly hard days.

My therapist would suggest that I spend some of the day just sitting with my emotions, feeling them, allowing them to wash over me, processing them. Nope on a rope as my youngest would say! The emotions are too big, too ugly, too overbearing to sit with, to feel, to process AND then parent afterwards.

I can't lay it all on the kids. I can't tell them how I don't want to get out of bed, play happy families or bloody celebrate anything because there is NOTHING to celebrate without Dylan.

So, instead, I push it all down, I make plans, I get on with it. Some would say I run from the big, scary, overwhelming emotions. I would say that I am a Muma bear in survival mode.

Regardless as to whether I am running or surviving, the world hasn’t stopped turning and my kids, like all others, deserve a special birthday.

So, I plough on and I even manage not to dwell on or cry over the fact that I booked a restaurant table for 3 instead of 4. That's progress of some sort.

It’s birthday day!

I’m a mess. I miss Dylan desperately and I have nothing much planned to distract us, just a meal out later. The birthday boy is looking at me expectantly, excitedly asking what we are up to today. I have no answer.

Instead, to buy me some time, I remind him we haven’t sung ‘happy birthday’ yet and pull up a video I recorded years ago, days after Dylan relapsed, of Dylan singing happy birthday. I hold it together and sing along. Then, as it finished, the phone slips from my hands which are wet from tears. I scramble to catch it before it hits the floor, which, like some crazy ninja I do, then I check the screen.

It’s open on a WhatsApp chat I have muted. I only check it once a week. There is a message, posted 10 minutes before offering a free space on a football camp starting in an hour.

Youngest loves football and so I snap it up. He is beyond excited and declares it the best birthday gift ever. I can’t help but smile, it’s a gift from Dylan.

Dylan has well and truly saved the day!

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