Each day I feel more and more desperate. Desperate to have my child back. Desperate to have our perfect family back. Desperate to have our complete family back. Desperate to find something, anything to help me not feel this way. I’m crawling in my skin trying to figure out how to function when I can’t have what I want most in the world. It feels like the walls are closing in yet I have no motivation to get out. Nothing brings me joy or pleasure. I can be distracted at most for minutes at a time but the memories and thoughts come rushing back in and I’m devastated and desperate once again.
I was remembering the other day something Ariella said years back. She was probably about 5 or 6. Some times she did say she wanted a brother or sister but she didn’t say it often and this one time I’m remembering, out of the blue she said “I love our family. It’s perfect.” And it was perfect. Until we actually had Ariella David and I thought we would have at least 2 children. But we had Ariella and our family felt complete. And it felt perfect. I loved our family of 3. We had our moments as all families do but mostly we were a very close family that enjoyed spending time together. We had dinner together most nights if she wasn’t at the dance studio, we had family game or movie night at least once a week, and we could talk to each other about anything. We had everything we needed. What do you do when you are missing something that is a part of you, that you can never get back, that made you whole?
No matter what I am doing, who I am with, thoughts of Ariella are constant. Some are memories of happy times, some are more recent, but most are just about how I wish she was still here to share my moments with me. Or heartbreak because of the things she will never get to experience. Everything is a trigger, a reminder of life without our perfect, beautiful, child. Last night especially. We had our first board meeting for Ari’s Bears in the process of becoming our own non-profit. She should have been there. She should have been running the meeting. I know she would have had incredible ideas none of us thought of. It’s so hard to continue this without her. But it’s impossible not to continue it.
The point of this blog is to truly express what life after losing a child is like. And it’s extremely dark. Every day I beg to die. I DO NOT HAVE SUICIDAL IDEATIONS. But I no longer fear death, in fact I would welcome it. I do not want to live in this world without my daughter in it. The pain is too great. Missing her and never getting to see who she would become. In talking with bereaved parents who have other children, they too have said they feel the same. And that if they didn’t have to for their other children they too don’t know how they would go on. But we do go on. We exist. But it is just existing. It’s not living. Parents further out promise that one day, years from now we will learn to live again, experience joy along with the sadness. But do you know how daunting that is? It’s not even been 7 weeks and I just feel so hopeless and shattered and sad. Maybe one day I won’t feel that way but this existence right now is pure hell.