The loss of one's Tribe

 I am innately a tribal person.  I suspect this has as much to do with human nature as it does with anything else.  I believe that it is quite natural for people to gravitate towards being part of a tribe.  We become a part of a tribe at birth, one rooted in our immediate family connections.  That in time it expands to include out maternal and paternal family's, friends in our neighborhoods, school chums, until such a time comes that we move into adulthood and venture out on our own.   Looking back I had strong connections to my wider family during my childhood as I did with my neighborhood friends.  Church was another tribal connection as was school and later into adulthood my work life, intimate partners, and long term relationships.  Tyler and I created our own primary tribe that included furry kids. Vester was his childhood animal companion that came to live with us when his mom moved out of state.  Some years after Vester had passed we adopted our own furry's, Larry and Sylvia.  When Tylers and my relationship ended my primary tribe became my kids until Larry passed some seven months ago.  This is where I seem to be struggling so deeply in this post Larry existence.  I no longer have a primary tribe.

In a more expansive way I have been reflecting on how tribal connections seem to be at the root of our political life, that many within our society seem to be saying that they feel that they have lost their tribe and their hope for a better future.  Or at the very least one that they knew from childhood.   I am grateful for growing up in the Midwest as it has given me the ability to look at politics from different viewpoints.  I can understand when one says that they fear for their future and that of their children.   My father grew up destitute because his father had died in 1929 when he was four.  I have pictures of him as a child literally clothed in rags.  After grandpa died and especially during the Depression my dad's older siblings were the primary breadwinners for the family.  More often than not when they had gotten married they brought their spouses to live with grandma or left only to come back with children in tow.  That changed when the war came.  Everyone who could work had a paying job.  Despite graduating from high school my dad struggled with writing as he had dyslexia.   He would have never been able to attend college.  However, after coming back from the war my dad had the ability to forge a work life that gave us a solid middle class existence, one that provided a roof over our heads, clean clothes on our backs, and a place to call home ; not withstanding the childhood trauma I experienced.   They were good at creating the logistics of home.  What my father and so many others attained post war has't been available for the average high school graduate for a number of decades.  Long gone are the days when a good union job with health care and a pension were attainable.  They have been replaced with the modern amalgamation of what is now being called the "Gig" economy.  Something that very nearly resembles what existed post WWI.  Dad's pension and post work retiree healthcare were the only things that kept my mom and dad from being destitute.  I get it when people say they are scared.  And I understand how such fear and vulnerability can be manipulated by demagogues.  We have seen it many times in our history.  The Huey Long's and Father Coughlin's of the world playing on the fears and vulnerabilities of others.  I see it happening all over the world today.  Those in power playing on those very fears and vulnerabilities while promising a return to greatness.  That old saying during the 1928 presidential campaign when things were rapidly heading downward just prior to the Great Depression.  Hoover promising "a chicken for every pot.  Wages, dividends, progress, and prosperity;  Vote for Hoover. " One only has to look at the news coming out of Europe and Asia to see how prevalent that myth still is.  Turkey, China, India, Russia, Hungary just to name a few are all in the grips of demagogues promising things that they can not possibly provide.  But yet they seems to sustain their power by hook or by crook.

I get it when I hear someone saying that they feel lost.  Most days I feel like I'm a ghost stealthily moving about a place full of memories, a place that is devoid of both life and breath.  Larry was that for me.  He brought both life and breath into our home just as Crook did and Larry's sister before.  That is what I seem to struggle with the most: what is this post Larry life that I find myself navigating. 

I was telling my sponsor last week that much of my work in recovery has been about coming to an accommodation with my childhood trauma.  I explained that the fact of my trauma changed how my body functioned, how my neural pathways work.  I said it was akin to losing one's limb.  You navigate the fact of it while attempting to create a quality life.  Historically, loss within all of its facets seemed to be the emotion that I am always trying to find an accommodation with and that is still fact.  I know Larry will never be coming back.  I know I can never recreate what I had with him, or  Crook, or with Larry's sister Sylvia before Crook.  I am also keenly aware that I felt for the most part content when Larry was alive.  The fact of him being with me, that we shared a life together.  That all things began and ended with him.  We were our primary tribe, the one that fed and sustained us both.  

The loss of one's tribe.  There is a deep sense of powerlessness there.  Of helplessness too.  Facts that most times seems too overwhelming for me to surmount.  Yet hope does exist there.  I see evidence of it everyday.  Extraordinary stories of people who have not only survived tragedy but have gone on to thrive.  I see hope in our impending change of political administration not that I am naive enough to think that all things will magically come right.  They will not.  My sponsor said something last week when we saw each other that reinforced the message fo hope; sometimes things have to die in order for others to live.  I would never presume to say that he meant Larry had to die in order for me to live.  What I heard was that change is inevitable.  That all living beings have a natural beginning and end and that I am subject to the same.  I heard that what one feels may be unsurmountable is also subject to change.  That not only can one survive what is thought to be insurmountable, one can thrive within that accommodation.  

I have no idea what my post Larry life will be  Or what continued accommodation I will be making to both my childhood trauma and my loss.  I only know that I am on a journey, a journey where I am seeking clarity from guidance while attempting to live an authentic emotional life.

Letting Go

When I left work around midnight it was a windless eighty-two degrees, a rare thing in San Francisco.  Nights like tonight entices one to want to take a long walk or go sit on a park bench while listening to the sounds of the City as it slows down readying itself for sleep.  In my birth town most summer nights were like this.  I remember laying in bed listening to the window fan in the basement, its belt flapping again the fly wheel as it pulled air through the open window above my bed.  I remember the sounds of the old Walker foundry pounding out steel with a methodical clunk some miles away.  The nights were so still that sounds would carry for miles.  Within that quiet of a balmy night there was a centeredness.  A place of unique quiet, much like what I felt as I stepped outside after work.  This felt sense of quiet is not the absence of something but the wholeness of nothing.  

In the weeks after Larry's death I felt the cacophony of my grief, a place where there is little quiet.  Rage was common place, so was my pleading, so was my crying.  Losing someone we cherish is like that.  Of us in perpetual movement as our grief overwhelms us.  I lost count how many times my closest friends held my space while I grieved.  Grieving during the End Times as I laughing refer to this pandemic wasn't easy.  When my friends wanted to hug me we couldn't.  For the most part we couldn't even be in the same room together.  Grieving in the Zoom generation.  Humor is a good emotion to have when all else looks bleak.  

I recently said to a few friends that this year feels a lot like 1968.  That year was as tumultuous as this one seems to have been.  There were assassinations, rioting, demonstrations, political upheaval, curfews, all seemingly co-existing with no end in sight.  There was a point then when we all had to let go and accept the reality in which we found ourselves.  To accept our powerlessness.  I suppose we all had to find a way in which to do that just as I have had to learn that recently; relearn it really.  For the most part I am powerless over most things in my life.  Not that my logical mind wants to accept that fact.  My logical mind, like my child trauma, wants to convince me that I am all powerful, all knowing, that in essence I am godlike.  To survive four years of untenable things being done to my body, things that started with the insane and ended with the unimaginable, one becomes convinced that to survive that one can effectively survive anything and more then likely control most all things.  Survival does that to the psyche.  It's raison d'etre begets the reality it has already manifested.   I had to laugh when I finally read the results of my physiological testing from 2009.  I went to be tested because I was having difficulty in doing the mundane motor skill tasks of everyday life.  What came out was a lengthy single spaced seven or so page document prepared by a battery of clinicians, all of whom were so rattled by my childhood trauma that had been revealed that they could not place me within any of their known categories, not that I was made privy to any of it.  It was years later when I finally got a copy of it and that was well after I had recovered memories detailing what they had saw.  It took me three weeks to get through reading it and then all I had left was the act of letting go.

Letting go.  It isn't a bad thing as much as it is a necessary one.  We let go of all sorts of things during our lifetime.  Of favorite childhood toys, friends we made in elementary school, clothes that no longer fit or that have gone out of style.  We let go of our school years when we graduate, of our childhood homes when we move on.  We let go of our grandparents when they die, of our friends who are taken prematurely from us.  Of our parents when the time comes.  Of our beloved animal companions.  None of which is easy.  Loss and death are messy and painful experiences but we are tasked with the necessity of living that truth until it is no longer our truth.  Acceptance is such a powerful act.  To accept ones emotions when one desperately want to escape them is an act of sheer courage.   Courageous acts done from a place of courage.

I was having a deep conversation with one of my oldest friends recently.  We talked about the need to let go when the time is right.  Nothing like hearing the guidance of my Higher Power through a trusted friend.  I do seem to be moving closer to saying goodbye to Larry.  The guidance has been showing up lately in the most mundane of places.  That's how guidance from my HP happens in my life; sometimes it is undeniably clear, most often though it is just found quietly within a larger unrelated entity.  Letting go does not mean that I will forget about Larry or stop talking to him, or lose all that he was in my life.  The act of saying goodbye is simply me changing in relation to the immediacy of my grief leaving the wider space it once occupied to which will alway be a part of me, my tangible memories of my precious baby boy Larry.  In the last six years I have had to say goodbye to many beloved people in my life; my mom, my dad, my rescue boy Crook, a number of beloved extended family members, and two close friends.  Change is inevitable.  As Plato said; "All is flux, nothing stays still."  

Letting go,  it's not a bad thing as much as it is a necessary one.

A Day Without Art

I can scarcely believe that today is the one month anniversary of Larry's passing.  Later on I will be taking down the purple fabric that I had draped across all of my art work the day Larry died.  The act of draping my art has been a mourning ritual that I have engaged in for nearly thirty years.  The origins of it are not familial but one that was started by the gay artist group Visual AIDS in Nineteen Eighty-Nine.  I had many gay friends who were artists at that time.  I met most of them during my college days, others I met in the neighborhood.  The Day Without Art project was created as a mourning ritual to honor those artists who had passed from AIDS.  Soon after it was expanded to also honor those artists who were living with the virus.  I began covering my art in honor of my artist friends who died.  As time went on it morphed into a way for me to honor those of my immediate family who had passed from this earth.  Sitting here as I write I can hardly believe that today is the day when I be uncovering my art.  I am thankful that the deep and grievous weeping has for the most part stopped.  The pain has not.  If anything it has deepened the further away from Larry I am.  When his dementia diagnosis came in some months ago I knew my time with him would be finite and I did wonder what my life would be like without him.  I thought about what it would be like not seeing his nesting spot on the bed, his fort in the living room, him not curled up sleeping on the perch in the closet.  What it would be like not to cuddle with him on the floor.  I guess in some ways I was naive about the relative nature of my post Larry life.  Maybe it was because I thought I had more time with him, that I could ease into my grief the way I did with Crook before he died.  Maybe it was because I didn't want to let myself go to "that" place again.  The one where I always go when someone I love more than life itself dies.  Sitting here as I write I'm also not surprised that I have been reluctant to work on my trilogy for some of the same reasons.  Jack has just lost his partner Patrick and is reeling within his grief at the sudden and tragic nature of his lover's death.  Last year I did try writing his truth but I found that I had just glazed over the surface.  I think it amounted to all of about three paragraphs.  Down deep though I knew that at the time I would one day return and walk beside him as we both navigated the depths of his grief, the depths of which I already find myself in.  What do they say about storytelling, write about what you know?
Two years ago I asked a writer friend of mine to do a manuscript read for me.  He had extensive training in the field encompassing both teaching and writing and I valued his input.  He was one of a few that I had asked for guidance.  After he had finished his critique we met for coffee at a cafe in the lower Haight.  The first thing he said when he walked in was, "I can't help but call you Jack.".   I suppose there's a lot of Jack in me and vice versa.  This is why I have been reluctant to bear witness to his grief.  I know that what is his pain will be mine and mine, his.
Writing can be cathartic; however, in the past few days I have been struggling with how one shares his innermost grief, the grief that only he and God bear witness to?  That was one of the beautiful parts of my life with Larry.  He bore witness to the laughter, the joy, the contentment, and the pain.  He was there for the deep sadness, the grievous weeping after Silvia, my dad, and Crook died; he was there for it all.  All the while being present in his body in the way only animal companions can be.  There's something to be said about the unvarnished ability to be free of ones baggage, to be in that perpetual state of grace that animal companions can be when their lives have been untouched by personal trauma.
Lately, I have again been questioning everything about my life.  How did I come to be where I find myself.  Why has life happened in the way it did.  Why seemingly insignificant decisions can grow into life shattering moments later on.  How the effects of trauma talking to trauma can make my life so unmanageable, information that I have readily shared with a few of my sponsees.  Many years ago I had made a conscious decision not to share the totality of my trauma history with many of my close friends. Only a chosen few know.  I made that decision knowing that my history is not for the faint of heart.  My childhood trauma was deeply insane at the best of times, and at it's worst, unimaginable.  To carry that reality in my conscious memory has been challenging.  Carrying it along with my grief......   I'll be frank in this moment about something that only my sponsor knows.  During the first week after Larry's death I thought about suicide.  I guess I'm much like my mother in that way.  After my eldest sibling Muriel passed away at five years old my mother ingested rat poison.  When that did not work she fled across several state lines to her oldest sister in Topeka refusing to come back.  After three weeks of pleading my father had to drive many hundreds of miles to get her and drag her back because she still had my one and half year old brother to care for.  My sponsor calls my thoughts of suicide trauma talking to trauma.  Nothing like having my own words reflected back.  I suppose in reality it is trauma talking to trauma.  The trauma of my multiple layers of deep grief speaking to and with the deep shame of my childhood history.  A lethal combination if there ever was one.  I told him laughingly but also seriously that at least I'm not drinking, drugging, or fucking my way out of myself.  Not that I haven't thought about it.  I have.  Thankfully the diversion from my grief has taken a decidedly more productive avenue of late as I have been doing the repair work around the house that needs to be done.  A much better way of coping wouldn't you say?
I have come to understand that grieving can be such a treacherous journey for me.  And I do my best to bear witness to the authenticity of my journey while taking ownership of it and the emotions that it entails but it can be such a convoluted mess at times.  I guess that is what grief is at its core.  Messy, convoluted, weepy, and full of unexpected emotional sink holes. 

Dead Man Walking

It is surreal, this path I am walking.  I feel as if I have slipped down the rabbit hole into an alternate reality, a reality where all the colors are so vibrant they seem to be lit from within by flames, flames that simultaneously both consume in death while facilitating rebirth.  Juxtaposition in this realm are many dilapidated stone houses, miles from each other, each of which is covered by ancient weathered vines that have over a millennia adhered themselves to the rotting structures.  Most of their windows are broken and as the winds move through the tattered cloth coverings billow into spider web covered interiors filled with the discarded belongings of people who have disappeared during another age.  As I navigate the convoluted paths of this reality, the ones that snake from one house to another through forests that are thick and overgrown I know what my task will be.  When I arrive I am to search for my truth, for Home, knowing full well that I will find neither.  And as I leave the realization once again becomes clear, that no matter how hard I search I will never find my way back home.  With each step I take towards the next house I can feel the increasing weight of it all as it sets itself upon my shoulders like a stone yoke.  This is the nature of my grief.  Millennia old, aged by time and circumstance, multiplied by death upon death as the vines of which have become one, entangled within my soul.  I thought, maybe in truth, more likely within denial, that I was building a new relationship to my grief.  Nothing like the death of one's child to clear the senses.
I have said that I have walked this earth before.  Many times as far as I can tell.  New York City was one, Budapest another, London, Moscow, maybe Vienna.   I tested this once in the mid Nineties when I met my friend Diane in New York City.  It was my second trip there and we had just finished a wonderful meal on the Lower East Side.  As we walked out of the restaurant I said, "Let me show you where our subway stop is."  I had told Diane about my history so she readily agreed as she had grown up in New York City and knew it well.  As we walked snaking our way northwest I went directly to the subway stop some seven blocks away, the one that would take us back up to the Upper West Side where our hotel room was located.  I had felt the same sense of deja vu when I was in London and Budapest.  When I went back to New York City just after my father died three years ago I had that same feeling again.  I had been sick while I was there and was grateful for a night out.  I walked a few blocks over to a cinema to watch a movie with Judy Dench.  On the way back to my hotel I knew that I had walked that street many many times before.  Closely on its heels came the familiar refrain, that I will be forever destined to wander this earth without ever being able to go back from once I came.  I wept when I got back to my room, as much as for losing my father as it was for the pervasive feeling of Other that has dogged me for the whole of my life.  I suppose I am much like my paternal grandfather's sister Hazel.  Hers was much like the life I have had.  She communicated with the dead as I have.  She had experiences that could not be explained; except by her.  Once, she had had a "Visitor" who came to her when her first husband was at work one day.  The visitor taught her how to play the piano, the one that had sat in the parlor collecting dust for years. When her husband came home there she sat playing like she had been a accomplished pianist for the whole of her life.  Dumbfounded, he asked for an explanation and she told him what had happened.  He was so unsettled that soon after he filed for divorce.
My dad came to me many times after he had died, sometimes talking with me, others not.  Our last conversation was him asking me how it felt to not have parents.  I was taken aback by this question at first but then I understood.   My dad knew who I was but had lost the ability to speak to me from the perspective of being my father.  My mom visited me after her death but in a nefarious way.  She, like my paternal aunt Jeanette, turned on the high capacity burner on my stove but without the flame.  Crook came to me too, albeit briefly.  I only caught sight of him once as he made his way over to our favorite spot by the south face living room windows.  That was where we would lay on the floor cuddling as I sang good morning to him.  Larry has been around too. Just after I got home the day he died I had laid down in bed not knowing what else to do.  When I rolled onto my back I felt him jump up, one of his front paws landing on my leg.  Since then I have seen him a number of times.  When he came in from the bedroom I got down onto the floor as I always did greeting him.  When he passed by I felt him brush up against my right forearm.  I saw him going into the bathroom too.  I followed him in turning the bathtub spout on for him to drink from only to begin weeping as I sat on the edge of the tub. 
When I said that all things originated from Larry, that he ordered every facet of our existence together, I never realized how deeply ingrained that was.  Everything around me has his imprint on it and not just the obvious things that I recently alluded to in my previous blog.  Every cupboard, every closet, the cabinet under the bathroom sink; they are all his.  How I partially close the shower curtain, how I stack the prerinsed dishes in the drainer, when and in what order I wash the dishes at the end of the day; they are all his.  How I hang my clothes in both closets, how every closet is organized, where I store my gardening shoes, it even extends to how I shop for fruit and veg.  They are all his. 
I always knew where he was in the house. Whenever I left, came in, or moved about, I instinctively made visual contact and if I did not readily see him I would search for him finding him asleep on the perch in the bedroom closet, or curled up under the bed, or baking in the sauna.  He was my touchstone of unconditional love and seeing him brought me eminence comfort and joy.  Often I would walk over, lean in, and gently kiss him.  In response he would curl his head under, or stretch his legs, his whole body quivering, while settling back into a deep sleep.  Now however, when I turn to look for him he's not here.  When I stop at the door craning my neck back to say I love you as I'm leaving for work I realize he is no longer here.  When I open a closet door, or a drawer, or a cupboard he is there but not here.  As I move about my world all of these actions have become ticking emotional time bombs that can in an instant take me right back down onto my knees.  And as I descend to the floor, my head bowed, my arms wrapped tightly around my chest, tears streaming down my face I utter what have become familiar words in the wake of his death, "I can't do this without you."
I am a dead man walking, my Raison D'etre having been taken from me.  I've noticed that at times I have agonal breathing, that labored way in which a person breaths just before death.  I do not always realize I'm doing it but when I do I accept that that is where I happened to be in the moment.  Just as when my chest closes down because of my contracting muscles are tightening around my lungs, or when I feel the blood draining from my head, or I feel my body being drawn once again into the fetal position, I accept that is where I happen to be, that this is my insurmountable grief speaking its truth.

The Loss of Oneself

Morning are typically hard for me  I find it takes me some time to get my wits about me, to get both eyes open at the same time.  Today is no exception.  As I sit here propped up in bed, my back resting against Larry's pillow I am faced with the reality of what my life will be like now that Larry is gone.  Larry and I had rituals in the morning.  We had rituals about many things.  How we woke up, how we said good morning, how we navigated our day together.  How we ended them.  Bedtime was of particular importance.  Me spooning with him on the floor, then him moving onto the sofa curling up, waiting.  Of me saying "time for bed" as I turned the lights out.  Of me picking him up and carrying him into the bedroom.  And once we were settled in bed, of me saying "lights out".  He had many things he did afterwards too.  Climbing under the covers for a while, then going to eat, followed by climbing onto the bedding box to stare out at the garden, eventually coming back to bed with me.  Even within his dementia he remembered.  Looking around I can see all of his favorite spots, the nest at the end of the bed, the perch in the closet that looked out on the garden.  That was his sister Sylvia's spot before it was his.  What I called the Sauna, the triangular space behind one of the bedroom doors that backed up against the wall where the heat pipe was behind, next to the radiator for the bedroom.  Larry had a particular fondness for the feel of cotton sheets.  He loved to sleep next to me on or against the pillow.  I suppose remembering is my way of diverting my attention from the obvious on this first morning without my boy;  how one navigates the pain of losing ones child.  Of how one defines oneself in the face of intense loss and with the prospect of becoming "Other".   In the old days it seemed defining ourselves was more straightforward.  People chose their marriage or profession as their title.  Mr. and Mrs. X, Doctor and Mrs. Y.   In Italy doctors are afforded the title Il Docttore when being addressed, both in and out of work.  People do it out of respect and to honor their accomplishments.  We have done the same for priests, college professors, and lawyers just naming a few.  Times have changed though.  These days we seemed to have come to the understand that the search for our authenticity is how we define ourselves, especially in the midst of loss.  Or it seems to be that to me within the microcosms of my life as I know it.  Even within the realms of gender we have come to understand that the traditional monikers of male and female no longer apply for some.  That gender fluidity is just that, the vast area that exists between the polar opposites of male and female.
Sitting here in bed, I wonder what my life will now be, how I will define myself as I face the abyss that exists in front of me. 
How does one take in the vastness of losing their existence as one knows it, of losing the sun that both fed and sustained.  Larry was quite literally the center of my life of which all else revolved. He was the core to which all else was ordered.  I may be sounding melodramatic, but I'm not.  There is a very real history to all of this.  It was Larry and his sister Sylvia who fed and sustained me through the darkest days of my early recovery nearly seventeen years ago.  Days during which I thought at any moment I would quite literally die.  It was the touch of their bodies against mine, the sound of their purr, the life I saw in their eyes that provided for me the only link to sanity and the real world I had.  When Sylvia died suddenly eleven years ago it became Larry and I; me trying to support him in his incomprehensible pain of losing the world as he had always known since birth and me of losing her and the understanding of what "Us" had been.  Before her death Sylvia had been the center of our existence.  She was core by which all else was ordered.  Her indomitable spirit, her ability to love and be loved so unconditionally was what had fed and sustained us all; and by the grace of the Universe Larry somehow survived the loss of that and his sister, as I of mine and her.  In the intervening years I adopted Crook and we forged a new definition of "Us" as Larry came out of his shell taking on Sylvia's indomitable spirit and ability to love so freely and completely.  Then three years ago we lost Crook and the unique unfailing love that he had brought into our family.  That is what I am again facing as I sit here, the loss of that indomitable spirit that only an animal companion can bring, that unconditional love.  The loss of my beloved Larry and by extension Crook.   I am also reliving the loss of Sylvia and the loss of the meaning of "Us" as I always do within the confines how my PTSD has changed my physical and emotional body's processes.
I blogged incessantly in the month after Sylvia's death.  Each entry titled only by the date and time in which it had been written.  Those blogs are a chronicle of the immediacy of my grief of that time.  It is still extraordinarily painful for me to read them.  It took me many years before I could comprehend the fullness of that loss.  And now I find myself back from once I came, sitting in the immediacy of my incomprehensible grief just trusting that my next breath will come when it is meant to.  I can't imagine a life without Larry.  What the loss of his loving spirit and by extension of our rituals will mean for me.
His death came as a surprise much like Sylvia's had.  She had been seemingly happy, content with playing and chasing Larry around the house only to be dead eight hours later of heart failure.  For Larry, he had had some ongoing dental issues since January, an abbess then, a small lesion now. one that was to be addressed by surgery yesterday morning.  Nothing seemingly bad or out of the ordinary.  Then the mid morning call came that he had suspected bone cancer, that a small part of his jaw had already been eaten away.  That left little choice in which way to go forward.  Before Crook died I had had a week with him to spend grieving his oncoming death.  With Larry.....
I can't say that I will blog incessantly during the next month as I navigate Larry's loss.  Blogging, like journaling, doesn't hold the same value it once had in my life.  Before, both were written words, a way for me to navigate and understand what was happening in the immediacy of my emotional and physical life during a time when without them I seemed lost.  Now.....   I suppose that is because I seem to have a better grasp of my internal processes or maybe I am just doing what I naturally do in the face of intense emotion; I isolate.  Either way my path will be what it will be as I am reluctantly forced to navigate towards a new definition of self without my precious baby boy.