I have been working for about a week on my landscaping and gardening.  Upon completion, I brought Troy into the backyard to show him everything I had been doing.  For years, I have thought about ripping up the old ground covering, planting flowers in the pots, putting in a garden, adding solar accent lights, and buying new patio furniture.  I was so proud of how well it turned out. I asked Troy to help me move the unused doghouse that always sat by the backdoor.  We lifted it up and carried it to the dog run by the garage.  We sat it down and heard the clinking sound of the baseball bats hitting one another from inside the doghouse.  Looking down, we noticed them at the same time.  Five bats.  One by one, I watched Troy pick them up and he told me which bat Dalton used at each level of the game.  There was his t-ball bat, his machine pitch bat, two kid pitch bats, and his wiffle ball bat.  Turning them over and over, I listened to my husband tell me all about buying each one and the little achievements DD made while using each.  By the time he got to the wiffle bat, we were both sobbing.  We stood out in the backyard for a little longer and cried together.  Troy went back into the house and I remained on the patio gazing at my yard.  Suddenly, I hated everything I saw.  It all made me sick.  The new mulch, the freshly planted rose bushes, the pristine garden with its recently tilled ground, the blooming hibiscus trees staring back at me from the pots, and the neatly installed solar lights all repulsed me.  Nothing about this backyard looked like a 13 year old boy lived there.  Gone were his muddy shoes by the patio door, his wiffle balls in the grass, and the sunflower seed shells I used to yell at him for spitting on my back porch.  The whole scene looked too much like a Home & Garden  magazine from Lowe’s instead of the yard of a family with a young boy.  I stayed outside and cried and cried and cried.

Lately, we are all a mess.  Colton doesn’t talk about Dalton much.  Sometimes that hurts.  Yet I know he is grieving.  Keely goes daily to visit her brother at the cemetery.  Yesterday she discovered that, with all the rain, the dirt had caved in about 2 feet on the grave.  The sight traumatized her.  My mother-in-law and brother-in-law spent the day today re-arranging the decorations.  I know I should be thinking about a headstone.  I just can’t.  It seems too final.  We are about to hit the six month mark without him, yet I can’t even begin to think about seeing his name in cement.  The thought makes me hurt too bad. It is a true physical pain to imagine it.

This weekend is Dalton’s memorial baseball tournament.  I love and despise the idea.  He should be playing instead of having his name on a t-shirt.  That doesn’t mean I’m not grateful because I truly am.  I just wish the situation were different.  Watching his team play without him will be excruciating.  I believe God allows people in heaven the opportunity to watch certain things that would bring them joy.  Therefore, I expect my son to be in the stands this weekend.  He was the biggest trash-talker on the field, which makes me assume someone in heaven is having to listen to him run his mouth about the Cubs winning their division.  I would expect nothing less.

It is almost Mother’s Day.  I embrace and dread the day.  My first Mother’s Day without my boy is weighing on me hard.  I want to hold him so bad it breaks my heart.  He is everywhere I look and everywhere I don’t.  I crave hearing his voice one more time, but then again, I ask myself if would it ever be enough?  I know the answer to that question.  It would never be enough.  I want him.  The real him, not an allusion.  In moments of weakness, I find myself trying to bargain with God to have him back.  I would happily barter to have my imperfect, funny, ornery son back in my arms.  In just six months, I find it getting more difficult to visualize the flecks of color in his eyes and the scratchy sound of his adolescent voice.  Then I look at a photograph and I recall each detail down to the lines of his hands and freckle on his back.  The reality of it all is enough to bring me to my knees over and over.

In his book, A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis writes “For in grief nothing ‘stays put.’ One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs.  Round and round.  Everything repeats.  Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral?  But if a spiral, am I going up or down it?  How often – will it be for always? – how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, ‘I never realized my loss till this moment?’  The same leg is cut off time after time.”

Tonight I feel very much like I am going in a circle of sadness.  My loss is staring me straight in the face.  Perhaps it is the work of the devil. He just chips and chips at me trying  to get me to be angry with God.  That’s not going to happen.  My  faith is in Jesus Christ and His resurrection.  For a Christian, everything centers around the resurrection because we know that at his second coming, Christ will raise all those who are asleep in Him on the last day.  He has promised an everlasting life and a resurrected body to his followers.  It’s like when Lewis writes, “I need Christ, not something that resembles Him.”  I feel that way about Dalton.  I want the real him here with me, not just something that makes me recall him.  That right there is also why nothing other than the Catholic Church will ever suffice for communion to me.  We get to have the real, consecrated body and blood as we celebrate the Eucharist at every Mass.  It is in that moment at church that I feel the closet to Dalton that I can ever be while still living in this world.  I can’t explain it totally, but I can say it gives me chills and an awareness that he is near.

So, DD, please keep watch over the U-14 Cubs and all the boys playing in your tournament.  We ask God to keep everyone safe and accident-free.  We also ask that you give all these great baseball players a special blessing as they play in the First Annual Dalton Palmer Memorial Tournament.  God, if you could throw in some sunny weather, that would be cool too!