Dear Ariella,

I don’t blog so much anymore but I do still talk to you most days. I hope you hear me when I do. It has now been 7 years since I’ve felt the weight of your arms around me, had the joyous sound of your infectious laughter in my ears, heard your sweet voice. I often watch videos of you to hear your voice again. It’s no longer clear in my mind. It saddens me that my memories are not as sharp. Makes me feel like I’m losing you again.

Seven years without you seems impossibly long. Feels like another lifetime, an alternate universe. Some times it doesn’t even feel like that was my life. It was a dream. Someone else’s reality that I was just observing. But as the anniversary of your death approached I was brought back to reality. Reliving those final days in the hospital. Many images and memories are a blur but not those moments. Not the ones I’d like to forget. And even when I try, my body remembers, betrays me, making me not only feel, but also display the grief that I have gotten better at living with and hiding during easier times. But I want to feel that pain during these times. Letting go of the grief would be letting go of you and my love for you. This doesn’t mean I won’t be happy. It doesn’t mean I’m clinging to the sadness and not allowing room for joy. It means that there are times I do live in the grief, that I embrace it, to honor you, and there are times (most of the time these days) that the grief is not nearly as heavy, that it doesn’t weigh me down so much.

Recently another family we knew lost their son, their brother. It was right before your angelversary. You knew him, were friends with his sister. Hearing this, seeing another community mourn the loss of another young person, increased my grief tenfold. I was already feeling it given the time of year, and I am heartbroken that yet another family will have to endure the unimaginable. All those emotions in the aftermath of your death were brought to the surface. The numbness, depression, not wanting to live, despair, unfathomable pain. I remembered it, felt it. I feel this anytime I hear of another child dying, and sadly there are too many we know there with you. I do take comfort in knowing you are not alone and you are not in pain.

A lot has changed these past seven years and I hope you can see that I have found happiness again, that I want to keep living, not merely surviving. There is still guilt in that but ultimately I know you want me to be happy. I want you to know that I am ok. I don’t want you to worry about me. I think about you and miss you every single day. I try to talk about you often. You will forever be a part of me. I am always your mom.

I love you to the moon and back infinity times,

Mom