Today is my daughter Paige’s 4th birthday.
4 years ago today moments before my little girl was born I was hit by a feeling of heading in to a great unknown. Life was forever changing in those moments in ways I couldn’t comprehend. It was terrifying. Paige came weeks early (and we were going with an inducing date, so we thought we had all the control on when it was going to happen) and there was just no preparing for it. People try and give you advice, and tell you how it is going to be, but you just sort of laugh and thank them for the advice, you have no frame of reference. No matter what anyone tells you or what books you read the truth is its a deeply personal experience that you have to experience to understand.
So here we are today 4 years later and life has changed. Priorities are different and we have a brand new source of joy. Because if nothing else that is one thing that will change for everyone – with a child your life will have a greater capacity for joy and happiness.
So today on Paige’s 4th birthday I’m most thankful for that – the joy she’s brought in to our lives.
Now my little girl is in Kindergarten and she’s making friends and coming home every day with some new knowledge to share. She’s growing up. Just yesterday she was an xray image, an impossible idea to my head around. Today she’s becoming her own little person and an amazing one at that.
Happy birthday Paige, daddy loves you very much.
Seriously. Where did October go?
When I think back on October 2011 I doubt very much I’ll be able to tell you what I did, or where I was. The month has been lost to a mixture of grief, insomnia due to the grief, and spending time with the family. I did some other stuff: Started an exciting new project (Details maybe soon), put in some game time, spent time learning and relearning a load of program languages and who knows what else – the details all seem foggy.
It’s been a blur.
The last few days this fog has become something tangible and the awareness of it has allowed me to start brushing it away. This evening I feel kind of reborn or reawakened or something. I haven’t spent much time thinking about my grief but it’s clearly taken a bit of a toll. But I think I could only write that last sentence with the worst of it over my shoulder, somewhere in the rearview mirror. Even if I haven’t shown it in public, I admit it, I’ve been at a low. But today, tonight, here, now, I feel optimistic and on the rise.
None of this makes the death of my Papa any easier but the bright, bright light of a wonderful life spent together through 29 years is starting to shine through the dark clouds of an August spent visiting the hospital, a late August evening I’ll never forget and a September and October lost to a haze of grief. Three months. That can’t hold a candle to 29 years.
Dark clouds in the rearview, sunrise as we move forward. Ever forward.