Seasons

A few months ago, I posted how a particular idea from a book had struck me: "Who came up with minutes, anyway?  Name one good thing a minute's ever done.  They shorten fun and measure misery..."  Last night as I was going through my pictures on my phone (something that I do even more than ever), I came across the next paragraph of that book, Love, Stargirl.  Jerry Spinelli continues: "As if Arnold could look up at this clock on the Lenape Building and read: 15 Minutes till Found.  As if Charlie's time in not forever stuck on Half Past Grace."  I believe I may very well be forever stuck on Half Past Caden.  It has been two weeks.  In some ways, two weeks feels like a very, very long time.  Then I remember the rest of my life, and two weeks feels like nothing.  But it's not nothing.  It's a very big something.

Not only are things getting just a little harder each day, but we have all been fighting a bug of some sort.  Randy was awake for maybe one hour on Sunday after spending a minute or two throwing up first thing in the morning.  His seems to be the worst of it.  Shelby started just before the end of school on Monday, then Shelby, Keilie, and Tyson stayed home from school on Tuesday, with Brennon having his bout yesterday and today.  Mine has been a bit different.  I've had my times of throwing up, but I have also had some pretty severe stomach aches multiple times a day for more than a week.  I think my body is really trying to process what has happened, on top of this bug.  I'm sort of a physical mess.  Not too bad, but not nothing either.  Our minutes are dragging, it seems.

I had my first instance where our neighbor didn't feel like a comfort, like a place it feels nice to remember being with my Caden.  I was walking to the mail, not really having any thoughts, when a single memory of pushing him in the wheelchair during radiation popped into my head and had me in tears.  I didn't really think they would last long, since it didn't really come with some deep emotional sadness, but I continued to have tears spill down my cheeks until I got home.  It was weird-- like I was sad, but didn't really feel it in my heart or think I was sad.  I know crying, I know when it comes from the heart and soul-- this was just crying without any real thought or feeling.  So I just cried.  The memory feels more surreal because of the lack of real emotion from my heart.  It doesn't really feel like I was the one crying.  I wonder how many more times things that give me comfort now, because they keep Caden alive in my life, will hurt me.

Life just feels so surreal right now.  One minute things feel OK, the next, tears are rolling down my cheeks without thought or emotion.  Our minutes are being counted at Half Past Caden right now.  There is beauty all around as the air turns crisp and the leaves change colors, but all I can see are the leaves on the ground and the stark, bare branches that have lost their color and gone dormant.  It's beautiful, but only because that is the season that we are in.  Seasons can sometimes seem too long, even at the very beginning.