Shooting Stars.

“I hope that you find time to let your hair down. You’ve taken care of everyone else – it’s time for you to live again and to focus on you.”

Sitting in that Parisian café, I knew she was right. A trip to the famed city of love to close the door on the past and embrace the future, and she had gamely stepped up to the plate. For nine days we soaked it in, traversing the Champ D’Elysee, mulling over Monet’s flowers and putting aside fear of death and decay to descend into the catacombs. We listened to the wind howl in the dark across the quicksand and gorged on mussels in ancient cities. We laughed over memories and raised glasses to ones yet to be made. And on the last day, I raced 600 stairs into the sky and stared into the horizon and wondered what it held.

A year later, her words echo in the voice of another.

“Everything you do is for someone else. You’ve worked hard to get the kids in a good place. It’s time for you to be happy.”

I’ve lost four years. It vanished. In minutes that stretched on for hours as winter descended and time froze around me and grief soaked my bones in cold. And with spring, the sands in the hourglass began to thaw. A slow bleed, minutes became hours and hours became days and days became weeks and weeks became months.

And suddenly I was no longer sitting in the darkness in the dead of night while the hands of time ticked slowly by. I was fighting to stop time from racing away. 

And they are all right. Driven by grief and mother’s guilt and loyalty and responsibility, my children consumed me. From the moment I broke their heart and shattered their world, I silently vowed that I would stop at nothing to bring them back to life. They would have the life we had dreamed that would be. I would hear their laughter ring again, like winter bells across the snow. We would cry and mourn and remember.

We would rise glorious from the dead.

Reborn from the ashes we have come back to life in vivid color, forever changed by what we should never have known. We are stronger for it and weaker, too. We live in each moment, like stars shooting defiantly across a midnight sky. And deep inside we fear that loss will come to us again.

I do not regret the choices I made and the opportunities I walked away from. Desperate to be touched and to find love again, the years of my lost life unexplored. Each decision grounded in love, they will never truly know what I lost in giving them new life.  

“Mom, I saw a shooting star and I want you to be happy again. You need someone who loves you and to take care of you. But he has to like sports. LOTS of sports. And movies. Definitely movies. And Lego.”