Tomorrow my sweet boy Ruairí, you would be 8. I am thinking back to when you were born, to all the nervous excitement I felt for your arrival, to meet this tiny person inside my belly. Eight years later you’ve arrived and also departed this life and that feels so hard to believe, still. Disbelief is a recurring feeling when it comes to your death.
I wish I could find my way back to one year old you in my arms smiling up at me. I wish I could look into those gorgeous blue eyes of yours and feel the warm weight of your body. I didn’t know your first birthday would be your only one on this earth. And I think I’m glad, because I held so much hope for a much longer future with you in it. But here I am today without you, and with your brother. My heart split in two yet full of love for the both of you. Grateful beyond words for the light your big brother is. I see your eyes in his big ocean blue eyes, I see them in your Dad’s too, and I love that.
So much of me has changed in the years since you left. You have taught me what matters and what doesn’t. I have become both more capable and more sensitive as I navigate my way in this life without you. I have learned that despite your death you are always with me, guiding me, and that matters so much.
Your Dad, your big brother, Rufus our dog, and me, we went to Cornwall this week. We go every year now around your birthday. A necessary and beautiful escape from the every day. I love the huge beaches, the sounds of the ocean. I wish I could bottle the calmness it brings and take it home. I love watching Rufus run around the beach and watching your Dad and brother pass a rugby ball. Me and your brother had sprint races bare foot across the sand, I lost every time, he’s so much faster than me now, the races make me laugh out loud. They make me breathless too. We also braved the ocean waves and I wondered if you would like the cold Atlantic? Maybe you’d be like your Dad and prefer dry land. I have a whole life time of imagining what you’d like. I like to imagine, and it’s heartbreaking.
I love you, I miss you, and I honour you, in the ways I can, every day my sweet boy.