A creative friend has started a class on grief journalling. When she said she wanted to start this in honor of her daughter and to help others channel their grief, I was totally on board. Sign me up! I had no idea what to expect and, now halfway through the course, I must say that it has been therapeutic. It is a small group of women, some who have lost a child, others a husband, a parent, or a special relative. A mosaic of pain and understanding. A safe circle where we are encouraged to share stories and celebrate the lives of those we lost.
One of our recent assignments was to write a “I Wish” letter to our loved one. When I told my daughter she gasped, saying that ask would send her over the edge. I sat to write out my letter and found that she was quite right. This exercise brought up all the what if’s and the if only and brought me to tears many times before I could finally complete it.
Dear Zane,
I wish I could have given you more. I wish you had taken a semester off to travel to Spain to enrich your love of the language as you had wanted to do. I wish we travelled to Montana, Vancouver, and Ireland. Those were always ‘one year’ plans we shared.
I wish I had taken a photo walk with you and spent more time learning about the camera we bought you, your prized possession. I wish you could have enjoyed the birthday gift I planned for you, shooting the cave and basins in Banff with a professional photographer guide! I wish you could have published one of your short stories or sold your photos. I wish the world could have seen the artistic side of you.
I wish you could be at your sister’s wedding, and I wish that a wedding would have been part of your plan. I wish you could be at the wedding of your friends who hold this same wish. You were to be the best man for many of them.
I wish you could have enjoyed your own home. A place that held your energy and that you found comfort in after a long day. We had such ideas of where this place would be, along the river, close to the night life you adored.
I wish that your soul plan had been different for you. And yet, I am learning that there is a reason for everything, including me having to live without you on earth. More than ever, I wish I could somehow be here, and you there and still be able to hold you.
I noticed as I wrote my letter that I was wishing for things for me; spending more time with him seemed to be an underlying theme. The letter was to be about what you wish they obtained or experienced before they departed, a written collection of what they missed out on. Writing what I wished for Zane, the answer to what he and all of us missed out on was simple. A lifetime of new memories. I wish for a lifetime of new memories we will never get.
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