You’re not crazy; Life is hard

I’m sitting in my home office, working on probate cases (don’t worry; I stopped the clock to write this), listening to Dashboard Confessional’s Chris Carrabba singing a song that unduly moves me to tears. It magically conjurs up memories of my children in a world where they are deceased and missed. Such a world, of course, is not reality right now; my children are alive and well. But then again they aren’t. Every day is a death.

My baby’s blue eyes fade to a stormy grey the older he gets. His infant cheeks disappear and mold into a child’s jawline. My firstborn’s clumsy twirling has left and been replaced by a nearly-tween saunter. Her squeaky voice has caved to a low-pitched drawl. The child from that moment — that one moment when I held them so closely that I knew they couldn’t slip away — has slipped away nonetheless. A new child born, of course, but the old one gone forever. Life is a kind of death, and you are not crazy to mourn it.

I think of my body, aching from the chair I sit in, my arms raw from the way in which they rest on my less-than-ergonomic desk and keyboard. I realize that time, to my consciousness, goes only forward and that, entropic by its very nature, it degenerates my body by the minute. I am plunged, by all worldly accounts, toward my impending illness and eventual death. Life is suffering, and you are not crazy to fear it.