Dear Crash and Mars:

It was a tragic sort of weekend as you said on the radio. A young woman, about to be married was killed at a Jeep demonstration. A young man ran into traffic and was struck and killed by a 17 year old driver. And yes, a car drove into a patio, and a 2 year old boy was killed.

You said the family of the 2 year old was ruined.

I was offended.

You see, there are a group of us who know what you are so frightened of. There are a group of women in my city, who bit their lips and closed their eyes and viscerally felt the pain of that mother. We know what it is to hold your lifeless child.

We know what it is to stare into closed eyes, willing them to open.

And we know what it is to wake up the morning after, and the morning after that.

We know.

And so we know – they aren’t ruined.

We know because we had to make a choice. We had to come back from this. We know that life, the universe and everything may come to an end in a terrible way one day. We know that life isn’t fair, it doesn’t even out and that declaring how you would never recover is no guarantee that the fundamental inequity of the universe won’t visit you.

So, we are offended.

Because, from this computer, in the 20 minutes I have squeezed out between meetings, in the middle of giving my best friend’s cat sub-cutaneous fluids and talking to my husband, I know that ruination is too extreme and not descriptive enough.

I held my son’s body in my arms while he died. My husband stood and watched us, held our baby as we said good bye. And then stood next to me for a long time as we clawed our way back to life.

And then, when it became apparent that there would be no more babies, we started a foundation to help others.

And then we became the world’s greatest Aunt and Uncle. And we fed a parade of young adults Sunday dinner. And we did a good job at our work and got promoted.

And we planted a tree for our son and renovated our house and we went for dinner with friends and paid our bills and went on vacations.

It has been five years since that day.

Long enough to know that this isn’t ruin.

When you say that they are ruined, you say that they can’t come back from this. You say that there is no hope and no redemption. They are, forever, broken.

Not broken, not ruined say we. Forever changed and forever missing their children, but not ruined.

So please, in the middle of this horror and pain, don’t use the word ruined. Because, when they are ready, there is a group of us who will help them try and crawl out of the hole. Just like others did for us. We will sit at the edge and wait, until they hold out their hand. And then we will tell them – what we did, what worked for us.

We will stare in their eyes and we will be unflinching. We will tell them that it will always hurt. The pain doesn’t go away. It is simply balanced, more distributed. It will not always hurt like this. It won’t always seem like this.

And a group of us, who have climbed from that hole, we know this isn’t ruin. We know that the universe that broke them, that dealt with them so brutally still holds sunshine and joy. We know that the universe will wait for them, will hold out the promise of better days.

We know that you can come back from this. We know that you have to. You aren’t ruined.

On Monday I was at my esthetician’s. She was listening to talk radio – I have no idea of the station, and there was something about Mother’s Day and something about all the reactions that people have, and then the host said something about wanting to talk about women who didn’t become mothers or whose children died.

I was getting my eyebrows waxed and was therefore somewhat trapped, and God bless Tara forever because she suddenly said “would you like me to turn this up or turn it off?”

I asked her to turn it off. It came off and Sarah McClachlan was turned on.

We could say so many things about Mother’s Day, and I swear to you, it seems in the five years that Gabe has been gone, every year that it comes around, I think “Oh, yes. This. Again.” And I think that maybe I should blog about it, but I don’t know what else I could say, what hasn’t already been said, what is novel or redemptive or even just really interesting about the whole day. The day always seems to sneak up on me. Some one says something about it in mid April, and then maybe I see a card display, and then there’s the stupid advertising (This years brilliance located by Mr. Spit. Give mum a break from the kitchen by ordering KFC. Because, you know, mum’s should be chained to the kitchen and dad is a loveable buffoon who can’t cook.)

And you wake up the morning of, and stupidly, first thing in the morning, you check facebook and then you back slowly away. You go into self protection mode. You stay off facebook and you don’t listen to the radio or watch TV and you don’t go to a restaurant or to a mall. You ignore the floral display in Safeway. You tell yourself it’s just a day, just another day and that it’s no better or worse than this day has been every year, and at any rate, you know that this day will pass, and if there is anything that the death of a child will teach you, it’s that you can survive a whole lot more pain, for a whole lot longer than you would ever have imagined.

Perhaps Loribeth expressed it best, I find the whole thing tiring. Not tiresome, where you feel ennui and listlessness and just a general weariness. There are no traces of cynicism. I don’t want to get rid of the day and I don’t care if you celebrate it. I listened to the stories of cold coffee and runny burnt eggs on Monday and I smiled.

No, I’m tired. If December 10^th is the one day that I think about the little boy who was so very nearly here, the day that my arms ache to hold my son, the day that I want time and space to do what they don’t do, and I just want the little boy back – I just want my son and there is not a thing that you can do or say that will ease the pain or the passing of that day.

If that’s what the anniversary of his death is, then Mother’s Day is all of the rest of the year, rolled into one 24 hour period. Mother’s Day is every single hope and dream I had, every single plan or thought for what my life would look like at 34. Mother’s Day was the one sure thing that I had – the one thing I thought would work. The one chance I had to take my sorry and messed up childhood and redeem it for someone else.

In times past Mr. Spit used to get me a card and a gift. From the dogs, from Gabe, from just him. And each year whatever comfort it provided receded into hollowness. Not because the gesture was anything other than kindly meant, but because there is nothing that can ever take away the hurt, and the best thing you can do is know that you have to live with it – don’t try and play it false – fill it up or smooth it over.

And this is the point that Sarah Mclachlan comes back into play. She has this line – Hold on, Hold on, this is going to hurt like hell.

And so when that day comes around, when it becomes almost too much effort to lift your head off your pillow, when you need a nap, when you don’t want to stir off the couch, you try to pace yourself.

Because whether the world realizes it or not, the truth is it hurts like hell most days. It hurts like hell because I’m here and he’s not, and as much as I love my life, I would have loved it more if my son was here.

Even here, sitting in seat 17C of Air Canada Flight 143 to Vancouver, even in this seat, typing on my computer, I would like a life with my son in it. I would walk away from the briefcase with the electronics and the slide deck I should be working on. Take the suits in my carry on – send them off somewhere because I would be barefoot, hair in a pony tail, reading the Wind in the Willows, doing the voices. I would be making chicken fingers and bribing him to eat carrots and I wouldn’t be trying to figure out how to rescue a project gone south.

And on Mother’s Day, when everyone celebrates what they have, I am left with a fist full of nothing. I hold on to, well, nothing. Your fist simply can’t close on what doesn’t exist.

But I hold on all the same because I know – this is going to hurt like hell.