Reflection

I have been reflecting on the past year a lot lately. The holidays always brings out more emotions probably because each year I pull out the ornaments and pictures from the past and it congers up all the associated memories. This year was especially hard. Everything seemed to bring back memories of our life as an intact family. The loss of our family as a whole weighs heavily on my heart and then the loss of Kevin being part of it even when we were apart is numbing. There have been many positive things happening in my life this year. Reid and I were married and we started our life as a family. This is a good thing and I can’t imagine how difficult this past year would have been without his support and love. My health is vastly improved, the struggles with my back and then the whole mess with the surgeries is a thing of the past. I actually am feeling strong and mostly pain free, but then again I am now in my forties so aches and pains are bound to be expected sometimes.
I have been going through all of the pictures and videos from when Meg was born up until present days. This has been fun to see my babies as infants and remember all the little moments, it has also been very hard to see images of Kevin, hear his voice and see the life we shared. Going through old letters and emails I found a series of the most difficult time in our life as a couple. Rereading them brought such sorrow to my heart. The things that get lost when you are hurting, communication is not always heard as intended and I look at what we wrote to each other now and realize we were both struggling to get the other to really hear that we still loved one another. Our own pain and frustration, insecurities and stubbornness seemed to blind us both. I am not sure that we could have ever reconciled our marriage there were some very deep wounds and some patterns of unhealthy interactions that may not have ever been resolved. Yet, I know in my heart that I never stopped loving Kevin I just could not let that love rise to the surface in the storm of conflict we found ourselves. I don’t think we ever put closure on our relationship; there was still a struggle for the truth around unresolved issues. Continued patterns of behavior that I felt compelled to help change. Parts of Kevin as a father I could not just turn away from and we struggled with this continually. The girls both wrote letters with the grief counselor as if they were written by their daddy, what they would have wanted him to say to help bring closure to the unresolved issues. Reading them made me so sad. I wish he could have told the girls these things himself and received the gift of love from admitting his own flaws. I can only hope that he would have been able to do this in life at some point. He simply was denied the opportunity. I wish I could have been at a point to forgive him for his shortcomings this is what stood in my way to healing for four years. I had already grieved the loss of our marriage and our home when he died, the grief I have felt for the loss of Kevin has been immense to compound that with the loss of our life in the same home as a family would have been so devastating that I am not sure that I would have the strength to cope with it all at once. I think of Kevin still daily, he is never far from my thoughts he never was.