My heart took a bad fall

There are moments which mark your life, moments when you realize nothing will ever be the same and time is divided into two parts: BEFORE this and AFTER this...

My heart took a bad fall...

collapsing everything I once believed while my faith, hope, and future crumbled before me. He was so young, we were so young, so naive to the world, living in a fairytale where there was always happiness and joy, this place where the only fear tucked deep within was the unease of losing a parent, never had it occurred that I could lose a child.

Fresh tears sting my eyes as I recall that young mother, a child herself, losing her child. Uneducated on how one copes with this downpour of grief during a time with limited resources. Engaged in a struggle to grasp enough breath to survive at all she stumbles forward.

And now, twenty-four years later, with more tumbles on this journey constantly creating doubt in the beliefs I attempt to infuse, I hesitate with uncertainty on how I have survived? Hoisting this heaviness buried deep within my heart with these band-aids of joy or gratitude hiding the scars while I smile and offer words of hope.

Still broken, I move forward. One more thing, one more day, exposing the vulnerability that is grief. Depression looms in the distance, even on the brighter days when the emptiness floods in exposing the scar on my heart that time will never fade, and again I shift towards joy. 

The joy that he lived as we were privileged to share his beautiful spirit, the joy of memories that I can forever hold near and the joy that life shows us each and every day.

Moving through this season of sadness I will always remember the blizzard of that day. The weather outside matching the storm within, but somehow spring does come again and I have a choice to sit in the sadness of grief or rejoice in the miracle of life, his life. 

So today with a smile of sweet memories, I will choose to see this day from a joyful place in my minds eye. Where he left his mark upon this earth with the most gentle and kind heart that anyone would ever know.

♥ Ryan Kenneth Zarlenga

12/7/87-2/23/93 

"The trouble is you think you have time." ~Buddha