It's seven years since you died.
It’s been a heavy week as the days pass by and inch closer to the night you died. The heaviness creeps into our hearts, and our bodies, slowing us down. Our family, our home, would be so different with you here. The future with you in it vanished the night you died. Your Dad, your brother and I, we grieve every version of life with you in it and all the things you’ll never get to do. To be.
I still sometimes find myself not quite able to comprehend that you’ll never be here again. I wish time travel was real, so I could go back to you. It feels like it almost is because in the quiet moments I find you my beautiful boy. It is the most powerful all encompassing feeling of love, of aching. It is beautiful. It is necessary.
When you died the moving of time without you felt impossible. I felt as though I was being dragged away from you. A vast sea of emptiness where you should be. But I know now that’s not completely true. It took a long time but I have learned that we are still connected, you and me, your essence lives on within me. It is you who makes me who I am today. I am a kinder, more understanding human being because of you. Your life continues to make a difference in this world through who I am and what I do. Every little kind thing I do is you shining bright, making that difference.
The pain of living without you here exists as it always has. It hasn’t gotten easier but it has gotten softer sometimes, and I have learned so much about living without you, and with you. And during weeks like this when that pain takes hold and reverberates through every part of me I remind myself it is love, and that you my beautiful boy are still here with me. It will never be enough, yet it has to be. Because it is.
My sweet, beautiful and oh so fierce Ruairí. Your heart inside mine always.
You can support one of the most important ways Ruairí’s life continues to make an impact by purchasing our book ‘Ruairí’s Rocket to heaven’, written to help provide guidance and support for young children.
All profits from sales go to Shooting Star Children’s hospices.