And even though I was dead, my broken heart gushed on pumping. My mind, nothing but a void of darkness with a single loose line, ravenously searched for a synapsis to cling to, any alternate scenario. Oh and my soul, reduced to ashes hardly clung to the air I had become.

I died that day, never to return. But, my body would not cease to exist, my heart, mind and soul refused to submit to the death of me and instead, dead me lived on in the most excruciating pain, in a foreign existence of myself.

The day I died went nothing like I imagined. For on that day, my heart suffered irreversible trauma, and my mind met an insufferable conclusion, and my soul shriveled up and turned to dust.

The day my son died, I died too. When they said he jumped in the water and didn’t come up, I wanted to jump in and drown with him. When I saw him in the casket, I wanted to climb inside and lay by him for eternity. When we buried him next to my brother, I trembled with a desire to feel the warm soil cover my face, to feel the weight and silence of 6 feet under and to be buried where I would never wake up to his absence again.

The death of my son and I has been a feral existence. Half of me jumped, drowned, climbed in the casket and felt the soil fill my nostrils. The other half is writing this.

By, Josh’s momma