Dancing With the Scars
Note to reader: This is part of an ongoing series about the life of my youngest son, Charlie, who died in July 2022. It’s a love letter to the unspoken places of mothering, parenting, divorce, and grieving. Most of this series is behind a paid paywall for now. If you are new here, you can start at the beginning.
This time of the year my body begins to remember.
It remembers my last hug with Charlie on June 25th, 2022 and the promise that connection held. He was doing really well. It was a gift of a last day with him.
My body also begins to remember that it’s almost July, the month he was born and the month he died. This July it will be four years. Charlie would have been turning 31.
That I even had one good last day with Charlie is a gift but I was lucky enough to have several; however, they came after some of the worst days I’d ever had with him. These were the moments when I saw the inner scars he held for so long become outer scars and those cuts were deep both to him and to me. Charlie wanted people to see how much he was hurting but the problem was the ones who needed to see continued to look away. They gave up on Charlie long before he gave up on himself.
Often I wonder how I got through the last four years. And when I look back at the last 15+ years, I’m curious of how I survived it all. In 2011, during one of the darkest nights of my life, an African woman extended her hand to me and said, “Come ... let’s dance.” This was in Zimbabwe and if you’ve read my books you know the story of Gogo, a healer and spiritual grandmother to so many, including myself.
