A World My Heart Never Wanted | Diary of a Grieving Mother

Note from Mary-Jo: This entry reflects my personal experience with grief following the loss of my son. While everyone's journey through loss is different, my hope is that these words offer comfort to those navigating the complicated space between knowing and accepting.

How many bones have I broken? Does it count if the same body part broke more than once?

You know, when I left teaching at Keesler AFB, Mississippi, to move to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, two different groups of people gave me an Emergency Medical Kit.

Seriously.

And they all signed it.

Why?

Because after five years, these people knew me. I had multiple surgeries and multiple injuries while being an instructor. I worked in a classroom teaching meteorology. Physics, no less! And yet somehow consistently managed to find my way to an emergency room.

And where was I going next?

Special Forces?

I can literally hear them all laughing at the idea. Not because they thought I wasn't driven or couldn't hack it. They just knew it was only a matter of time.

They weren't wrong.

And joke's on them—I used both of those kits!

By the time the Air Force medically retired me after fifteen years, I'd managed to break my nose (roughly eight times), my jaw, my teeth, most of my fingers and toes, my eyesight, my brain, ripped muscles from my ribs and spine, and collected a mess of other injuries along the way.

I also left the Air Force missing multiple internal organs.

I'm no stranger to pain.

I just had my cervical spine fused last year. That one hurt a bit.

Shoot, this one time, I was in my bedroom using one of those exercise bands with a ball at the end that you secure in the door frame. I was sitting on the floor, holding each end wrapped around my hands and doing some sort of rowing exercise.

As I pulled back, the ball came loose from the door and smashed directly into my ear.

Because of course, I turned my head the exact moment I felt it slipping.

Immediately deaf, head spinning, tunnel vision setting in, I found myself sprawled across the floor.

Justin didn't know whether to laugh or be worried as he hovered over my groaning body.

So he laughed while helping me up.

See, I've learned over the years that I don't make mistakes...

I create learning opportunities.

And what I learned was this:

Make sure the ball is secured on the side of the door that doesn't open.

Otherwise, you risk pulling the door open just enough for the damn thing to launch directly at your head.

That was just a small taste of the learning opportunities I've created for myself throughout my lifetime.

Pain is my ride-or-die.

We've walked hand in hand many times through this one life I've been given.

When I fractured my ankle, Aidan and I laughed hysterically as he drove me to the hospital because he couldn't get over the fact that he had to pick his mother up off the ground and carry her to the truck!

Trust me, it hurt.

But we found the situation so ridiculous that we laughed about it the entire ride.

Poor Aidan, took after his mother.

That boy spent so much time in and out of hospitals with broken bones and twisted knees, that I think he would've surpassed me eventually.

No Stranger to Pain!

I've survived many facets of pain.

But none of them prepared me for this.

There's pain that can't be dulled with ibuprofen or morphine.

At times it can be tempered with depression or anxiety medications, but those are temporary.

Even time won't fully take the sting away.

It's June.

Ten months.

How has it been ten months?

Almost a year.

This is the longest I've ever gone without seeing Aidan.

Sure, I deployed for several months or left for temporary duty assignments.

But never in his lifetime had we gone this long without seeing each other.

I watched a show the other day where a man said something along the lines of, when something you're used to seeing every day is suddenly gone, it can take the brain a while to catch up.

It's very true.

My brain hasn't caught up.

I know what happened.

I was there.

I held his hand.

I watched the numbers fall below fifty-five.

Then the forties.

Then the twenties.

At six, I stopped breathing.

All I could think was that I wanted to be touching him, holding his hand, talking to him when that number finally reached one.

Yet somehow, deep inside me, my brain still expects him to walk through the front door.

To text me:

"Mom, where do you want the load of stone dropped at Mem's?"

The facts are there.

The acceptance isn't.

Maybe it never fully catches up.

Maybe love and loss simply learn to coexist in ways that make no logical sense at all.

Perhaps that's what grief is.

Not forgetting.

Not even acceptance.

Just slowly teaching your brain how to coexist in a world your heart never wanted.

—Mary-Jo

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From the pages of Diary of a Grieving Mother