Today is the third anniversary of my son’s death. Exactly three years have passed since the moment Craig went on ahead of us and the pain is every bit as real now as it was then. It might as well have happened yesterday in how I’m feeling at this moment. The sharp edge of grief has not dulled, nor the sense of loss eased. How could it? All it takes is a thought – a single random thought of him not being here – and the flood of emotion wells upwards.

A couple of nights ago – Halloween night in fact – I walked up to the graveyard to spend some time at Craig’s graveside. I’ve always preferred to visit Craig’s grave at night. For me it always seems more peaceful, more honest. Anyway, earlier that day we had placed a number of Halloween bits and pieces around the grave and so that night I had with me a lighter to light the candles for the pumpkins and ghosties. When lit, I stood there in the dark – the only person in the graveyard as far as I could see – and watched the flickering flames casting their shadows on the gravel bed. My first thought was how much Craig would love this scene and so told him as much as I hunched close to the warm glow at the base of Craig’s headstone. Craig loved all things spooky and, like me, had a fondness for cold or windy days – that night it was all these things. I talked with him about everything I could think of. I told him, like I always do, that I loved him and that I was sorry for not being able to save him. I cried and hugged the picture on his headstone as I cursed the relentless ‘unknowing’ that shadows the skeleton of my life now and only asked that my Craig was kept safe and happy. I spent some time there, chatting and crying to Craig like some madman in the night but feeling closer to him and somehow the better for this quiet time alone sharing the rare honesty of myself with my boy.

Standing there I could hear and see fireworks in the distance heralding as they did celebration, excitement and joy. On the other side – the bright lamp-lit side – of the graveyard wall I could just about hear the giddy rustlings of little witches and demons as they scurried from house to house accumulating endless fistfuls of sweets and lost in the indulgence of Halloween. They were loving it, and rightly so. It occurred to me also, as I stood there, how scared those children would be to enter the graveyard on this night. They might dare each other to go in, and perhaps one or two brave souls might even get a few feet past the creeky gate before sprinting back in surrendering terror. I even thought of my own childhood and how I possibly wouldn’t have been brave enough to enter either. And yet here I found myself now, a lone adult figure standing in the cold windy darkness of this terrifying place and all I could feel was overwhelming sadness. There was no fear. Not that type of fear anyway. I wasn’t afraid for me or for what may come reaching out from the shadows. No, I just cried for my son who was on the wrong side of the wall that night.

But I also knew I had another son back at home dressed in a little pumpkin suit and who, with a bucket in his hand, was ripe and ready to go out on his first ever trick or treat. He was waiting eagerly for his Daddy to come back, from where he didn’t know, and bring him out. So I kissed Craig goodbye and told him that it was a big night for his little brother and that I had to go.

The pull of emotions can often seem overbearing at times and I sometimes wonder what effect these emotional extremes might have on me. The incredible loss of Craig. The joyous gift of Dean. A life of mourning. A life of living.

But life is what it is. It plays out one way or the other and you simply have to get on. That’s just the way it is.