There are so many moments when I am flooded with missing her. The shock hits me like a freight train that she’s really gone. I know that it sounds crazy, but it scares me to think of a time when I don’t get hit with how much I miss her, then she will seem farther so much farther away.
Mornings are hard, I miss her… but then again afternoons are rough, evenings difficult and night-time is downright painful. So my logical self (she doesn’t pop out too often) knows that life will start to grow around the pain and the missing, that it will be permanent piece in my new normal- my future life of living.
Do I ever hope life gets easier? Do I ever want to feel less pain? I know the answers to those questions, for me, are not the answers people would assume. I don’t really hope life gets easier. I don’t really want less pain. In a way, those are the ways I KNOW that I remember, the ways my heart knows she was so important and real. When I don’t feel pain or I start to move a little easier will that mean I have moved on? I don’t know, all these things my brain will get to, when it is ready.
Right now I’ll let the weight of the day rest on my shoulders and wait for the darkness of night to consume me and my thoughts for another sleepless night. This is a journey of me finding my new normal. I miss my old normal all of the time, my normal that included Everlee. I don’t know how this new normal will ever not be broken and in a way empty, but I choose to know that there is some path out of this darkness. I didn’t just lose my baby, I lost my whole world.
Being Everlee's Mom 
You are touching on what people sometimes find so hard to get. That new normal. You never “get over it” it doesn’t go away. You just learn to live with it. You still cry when you see a parent with a kid, you still get that impossibly large ache and that lump in your throat at the most random seeming times. But you go on. Because you have to. Because it isn’t fair to their memory to just give up. No matter how easy it would be. You go forward. You think different, sleep different, react different. The you isn’t you anymore. Parts are there, parts are gone and new parts are filling in the spaces. You aren’t alone in those sleepless nights Nd morning aches or the terrible afternoons. Your experience is unique and your own. No one else’s compares to yours. But you are not alone.
If you feel like reading, you may want to check out Joan Didion’s memoir “The Year of Magical Thinking.” It’s the book she wrote after her husband died suddenly at the same time her daughter was facing a life-threatening illness. The part of it that stayed with me the longest was when she talks about how–for the first year–you mark every day of the loss with a memory of what you were doing a year ago. “A year ago was when he was diagnosed….a year ago was Christmas….a year ago was the day he died.” Then you hit that day just after the one year mark when you have to say, “A year ago, he was already dead.” That day was hardest for me because I felt something akin to what you’re describing–that I was getting farther and farther into a life without him. I had already marked the milestones. I had the advantage of knowing that Richard wanted me to find a way to be happy again. He had told me that and he left me a letter with that message. You didn’t get to hear that from Everlee, so you’re having to feel your way to that day sometime in the future. My friend, Shannah, lost her husband a few years before Richard died. I asked her if it ever got better and she promised me that even though the hole in your heart stays there, the rest of your body gets used to working with it.
Peace to you, Rhonda. You are walking the path. Just keep walking. If all you can hang on to is the way your feet connect to the earth, focus on that.
I wish i could take this pain away from you, i hate to see you hurting so much. xo