Regrading death of a child-June 4th is just around the corner
05/28/2007 03:21 p.m.


It's nearing June 4th again. It's been 24 years since I found PJ's lifeless body, June 4th, 1983. The trauma of that still haunts me. This year, though, in particular, I find myself aware that "the day" is approaching, but I'm not sure what it's going to bring. It's always a suprise.

Of course the first few years that awful anniversary came were very difficult. I relived finding him, but not just on June 4th for those first few years. Then, a few years passed where I would be vaguely depressed and didn't realize why - just experienced a sense of something not being right in the world, and a sadness I couldn't quite put my finger on until a week or so AFTER June 4th, and then it would dawn on me.

The last couple of years have hit kind of hard, I think maybe because the curiosity of who PJ might have been, how his life might have unfolded, have been on my mind. With Joey being 22 and married last month, I really wonder about PJ, if I might have been a grandma already if he were still living. I wonder what he would look like, what our relationship might have been like, how my world might have been altered if he had lived.

And then, of course, there are the memories themselves of that awful morning. No one prepares you for what it might be like to discover your infant's lifeless body, how it will look, the texure of skin...how desparately you must embrace the fact that WE ARE NOT OUR BODIES, for if we were, that would have turned my precious boy into some grotesque monster. A lifeless body is frightening in appearance. That took some pretty serious processing, to separate the little baby I loved from what I found that morning. He had been "gone" for about 4 hours when I discovered the shell he left behind, so the process was somewhat advanced by the time I walked into the room. And it did take some time to dis-associate his body from his essence. I was plagued with bad dreams about some disproportionately large lifeless baby looming behind the closed door to his room for quite some time. Finally, a few months after it happened, I decided to open the door to his room, and then I filled it with plants and sunshine to dispel the death that had occured there, and tried to move back into the land of the living.

For some time afterward, and still sometimes to this day, I feel the "upside-down"ness of the fact that one of my children died while I continue to live. It's so skewed from the way you think life will go. Since then, I've always had this vague sense that I entered an alternate reality that day and the feeling persists, less so now than 20 years ago, but it still hits me now and again.

5 or so years ago, I was hit particularly hard by the depression, and it didn't click that it was June 4th for a couple of weeks. It was a VERY difficult year in terms of the anniversary, and not realizing it was the anniversary of PJ's death that I was dealing with seemed to extend the difficulty, and so I try to avoid that by remembering that the anniversary is approaching so I can be prepared with whatever direction my psyche is going to take to deal with it.

The last couple of years I had a sense of what was coming, it wasn't too terribly intrusive, and so the anniversary passed with relatively little life interuption. This year I don't get a sense of what's coming, and so I was hoping that writing down in here, in my journal, would help. We'll see. Maybe I need to make a journey to his gravesite, although I've never felt the need before. He is not there, only his bones, and I have no attachment to them. His essence is elsewhere.

On that note, I find a couple of things VERY interesting that have happened in my younger sister, Carla's, life that seem to be related to PJ. PJ was my first child, born March 15th, 1983, died June 4th 1983. Carla's first child, Mikayla, was born on March 15th, 10 years later. Then, last year, Carla married Steven, a man who is exactly the age that PJ would have been, who was born on June 4th, 1983, the exact same day that PJ died. Very weird to me.

Well, hopefully writing it all down will ease the stress of whatever the anniversary might bring this year. For some reason, I'm kind of feeling very tuned into that day in the past this year. I feel the significance of it pressing down more than most years.


I am currently Reflective
I am listening to A Winter Snowscape by Jethro Tull