That Time of Year

It's that time of year again.  I can smell it in the mature corn that surrounds us, feel it in the morning dew and in the chill of the evening, hear it in the sound of the cicadas, see it in the steam rising from the pond in the early morning.  It is there in the nervous excitement of back to school and in the daylight hours that grow ever shorter.  It is that time........the time of year that Laynee died.  Memories of her life and her death seem to permeate the very air that we breathe. 

Sometimes I marvel at the human mind and how the senses have so effectively captured and preserved the memories of those days before the accident.  It is as if somehow, instinctively, my soul knew that my time with her was drawing to a close and so the senses grabbed and clung to every possible reminder.  There are times, still, when I forget.  I expect her to come running around the corner, to hear her soft bubbling laughter.  I wait for her.  But then.......then I remember. Then the pain crushes, once again. 

Last week a piece of mail came.  It was addressed to Jalayne, not Holmes, but her birth name. It obviously came from a long outdated mailing list.  But still, it was for her. It was her name, that beautiful name, Jalayne.  It brought a jolt of painful reality and disrupted the act of carrying on that occupies every moment. 

It hits me most in the peaceful, early mornings when the world awakens to sounds, all the sounds except her jabbering in her bed.  And in the evenings, as heat begins to leave the earth and quietness begins to settle around us, I think of all the should have beens.  And late at night, shrouded in darkness,  I awaken to her name on my lips and the crushing, sometimes unbearable, weight upon my heart.  That's when it hits me most. 

 I still wonder "how am I supposed to do this?"   I have asked that question an infinite number of times but have yet to hear the answer.   Some may say that I AM doing it, but my heart......my heart just can't stop hurting.  Jade's words from three years ago, reverberate in the very depths of my being....."It's never going to be okay again."

 

They say time heals all wounds,

but that presumes the source of the grief is finite” 

-Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince