This week I want to discuss Mother’s Day. For Barbara and I this was the first Mother’s Day since Craig passed away that we had another child, our beautiful Dean, to spend the day with. This day for the last couple of years has been an incredibly painful one for us both, but especially for Barbara.

I suppose in the last few years the reality of Mother’s Day, spent in the absence of any children, was a horrific and raw experience to endure. It was a layered trouble that hung heavy on our shoulders. Layered in that it wasn’t simply just the loss of Craig and the terrible haunting grief that his absence created, but that loss coupled with a general feeling of alienation among the hoards of happy families who seemed to rise up and spill forth from every corner of reality on that ‘special’ day. You see it comes back to that feeling of being an imposter:

Barbara and I told ourselves, rightfully, that we were still a family and more specifically that Barbara hadn’t stopped being a mother just because Craig had left this physical world. We knew this, but such is the power of grief and its effect on the bereaved mind that sitting in the presence of all those families having their meals and celebrating their mothers, we felt like frauds. “What are they doing here?” is what we feared they were saying. “They’re obviously not parents, why did they come here on such a busy day?” the words that taunted us silently as we sat and chewed our food. They might even look upon us and pity us for not being as fortunate as them with their lovely families and happy memories. But the worst thought, the one that pierced deepest, was that all those people were looking at us and in the privacy of their thoughts had concluded we were childless and in the instant of that thought had dismissed out of hand the life of our beautiful little boy.

It is an unbearable thought for a bereaved parent to cope with. All of us bereaved parents want our children to be remembered. Their memory is the only thing to survive all this loss and pain and we hold on to it with such desperation and with such love. It hurts us beyond measure when our children are overlooked and forgotten. For us, they are as relevant, they are as loved and cherished as they’ve always been. When we do not see it in the eyes of another it upsets and angers us. As time passes memories fade, but not for us bereaved parents. For others, with time our beautiful son becomes ‘that boy who died when he was 6.’ The personality, the vibrancy, the wit, the tears, the laughter, the singing, the entire and beautiful life of our special boy is lost to all those who can just about faintly recall the little boy who died young.

So even though this year we had a lovely Mother’s Day with our beautiful Dean with us, we still struggle with keeping Craig’s memory alive. It will always hurt; there’s just no getting away from it. We were blessed with Dean coming into our lives and we love him dearly but it saddens us so much that he shares his mother with a brother he’ll never know and that despite our greatest efforts to the contrary, he’ll somehow feel the shadow of Craig through his life. We can only hope that it’s Craig’s light that he feels and nothing more, for we love our two boys with all that we have and Dean has brought such hope back into our lives.