My Isaiah,
Last night as I was scrolling through videos I came across the one of you having your “night terror” in the van that we now know was a seizure. I can’t get myself to watch that one. I’ve watched your honor walk a few times, but that one with your seizure is too hard. That was our opportunity to catch this, but even with my video footage to show the doctors nobody caught it. That video makes me more angry and I just don’t want to go back and watch what was happening and missed.
Elijah starts Pre-K tomorrow. He seems pretty nervous, but a little excited. I’m sure if you were here you’d give him a big pep talk about how fun Pre-K is and how he’s going to get to do fun things. By the way, he shared his pizza this afternoon with you? I’m not sure how it worked, but I didn’t ask questions. He seemed very serious about sharing the pizza. He said tomorrow he’s going to get you an invisible Lego set. Again, I am not quite sure how that works, but it’s how he’s coping and that’s fine.
We met with a counselor at school today for Ellie. We laid out anything and everything that’s going on. We told her we are having trouble getting her to talk through anything dealing with you, so I hope she can help. Ellie’s working on a writing assignment in class and they are writing about the different “milestones” that happened each year of life. You’re there on her first year of life when you were born. She also added losing you to her tenth year of life. That sucks. There’s no other way to describe that.
I was thinking about you today when I was looking at my Snoopy Halloween blanket. You never got to see this blanket, I just got it this year. All I could think about was how excited you always were for things. You were always counting down to when a big event was happening and then made sure we celebrated to the fullest. You seemed to live every day like that.
I want to just make sense of everything, but it’s impossible. The other day in therapy I told her that I feel guilty for thinking how unfair life is. I lost my eight year old with no warning. I feel guilty because there’s a lot of people that have to deal with losing children. There’s horrific things happening in other countries. It’s like I’m so mad at life, but I feel guilty because I know there’s people that have it worse. I feel like I can’t complain because “it could always be worse”. The therapist just told me to not compare. Maybe it’s the trauma? Maybe that’s just how I think I need to be? I don’t know, it’s another one of those amazing lessons I get to learn from this whole thing.
So there’s been a random Alexa reminder that goes off every day at 9:01am. All it says is “Isaiah”. I never knew who set it, but I didn’t notice it until after we lost you. We were out running around a lot more before, maybe that’s how I missed it. I just went into the app to try and fix Amazon story time for Elijah. I saw the reminder up there with your name and decided to click on it, it said it was made on April 29th. Knowing that, it was probably you who set that reminder. I made me smile. I will never stop that reminder, it’ll be there the rest of my life as long as the technology doesn’t become obsolete.
Elijah says, “Isaiah, I love you and I’m about to cry. And tomorrow is my first day of school. Isaiah, remember that time when I gave you the pizza? We were sharing the pizza? And I already got the surprise in your mailbox.”
Baby, we love and miss you more than anything. Life wasn’t fair to you and I wish I could take your place. I don’t want to live out the rest of my days missing you like this. I am mad.