Next week will mark the day my daughter would have turned nine years old.
She died almost five years ago. But as a mother, I feel the responsibility to always remember how many years it has been since she was born. Just as I know the ages of my other children. I don’t want to have to fumble for the number and do the math in my head. I just want to know it, just as I know the ages of my sons whenever someone asks how old they are.
But, of course, she’s not nine years old. She only lived for four years.
So which is it? Is she forever four? Or was she four when she died and “would have been” nine now?
Whatever the answer, it serves as a painful reminder that I’ve lost the joy of seeing my daughter grow. I’m trapped in a world where I’ll always be wondering what she would have looked like? What would she have been interested in? What sports would she have played? Or would she have hated sports and preferred some artistic pursuit instead? The questions are endless.
Having all boys at home, I have no points of reference for what might have been. I have no close friends with daughters who are nine that I can hang out with and longingly see how they act or what music they’re into or what clothes they wear.
I get glimpses of girls her “would have been” age every now and again, but they are sparse and intermittent at best.
I’m quite sure I’d be sick of the Frozen soundtrack by now, which most likely would have been on heavy rotation in our house. She would have had her own funky sense of style, and drawers and closets overflowing with a variety of clothes based on her love of them in the four years she lived. I’m quite sure she’d still be driving her brothers nuts, yet endearing herself to them at the same time.
But that’s just it – it is the underlying pain of not knowing.
No matter how far I’ve come in my journey of grief, I will always be left longing for the future I’ll never get; a future that contains all my children. So I’m left with a future that contains five children. Four of whom I’ll get to watch grow and mature, and one who will be four when she died and would have been…
This website was inspired by the memory of Margareta Sol Kubitz in hopes of helping others work through the pain of grief.
That longing for the future you’ll never get (and that Margareta will never get) is a hole that nothing can ever fill.
My son passed away in May this year. He was four. It is his birthday in two days (5th b’day obviously) and I was contemplating writing a blog post or poem called Forever Four so I googled it to see if other parents used this term. I imagine I will be celebrating birthdays forever but hope to try let ‘the other day’ just pass. I am pretty curious what you do on either day
I’m so sorry for the loss of your precious Nico. I’m sure his impending birthday is going to be bittersweet no matter what you do. On the weeks leading up to my daughter’s first birthday after her death I was very unsure of what to do. I didn’t want to buy presents since she wouldn’t be here to open them, but felt we had to do something significant that day. It came to me one night that since she loved ladybugs so much, I would buy some live ladybugs and we released them on her birthday at the cemetery. It has become an annual tradition for our family.
As for the anniversary of her death, I still haven’t come to terms with the “right way” to acknowledge it. I wrote a post about it last year (http://wp.me/p2imOE-gA), but my reaction and approach still seems to change each year. It will forever be a reminder of a horrible day, but I’m still trying to learn how to shift the focus from how she died to how she lived. Whatever you decide to do, if you’re anything like me, you’ll find the anticipation of how you will react to the anniversary of his death to be far worse than what you experience the day itself.
I wish you peace. Maria