I lost my child…today

New year is feeling like a tall task.

How can I possibly be excited to move into 2026 when he is stuck in 2023?

How can I possibly say I lost my child three years ago when to me it feels like yesterday?

How can I make New Year’s resolutions when the thing I truly want is impossible to have?

I’m always filled with fear of leaving him behind. 

Of the distance between us growing as the clocks continue to turn. 

Sometimes I wonder was it eaiser in the early days? Those first few raw months without him.

When the grief was all I was expected to feel and everything else stopped. 

Whereas now I have to feel all the things and everything is moving so very very fast.

I wish I could stop the clock. Just for a bit. Pause it all and stay close, not move further away. Just pause and breathe. 

On good days I feel like we are walking hand in hand through this life, team mates taking on anything that’s thrown our way.

On bad days I feel so alone. And worse than that, I worry he is alone. That is hate to bear.

And whilst the 31st of December is in reality just another date, I really hope it’s a good day. 

I hope I can close my eyes and breathe in his sweet milky smell, feel his soft shiney cheeks against mine and feel his little sticky fingers wrapped around mine. 

I hope we lay down together when the clock strikes midnight in that space between awake and asleep. Reality and dreams. Me and him.

I know I can’t stop time. But I won’t stop either.  I know my fierce lioness mum love I have for him will survive the passage of time, it will give me strength when I feel so very weak. Like now.

In 2026 when I have to say ‘I lost my child three years ago’ I will do so honestly with no expectations to be fine and the realisation that I will probably never truly be okay. 

And that in itself is okay.

Let’s do 2026 Albie, not with fireworks, or champagne, or great expectations. 

But together.

‘Time has not moved on for me.
The numbness it has disappeared.
My eyes have now cried many tears.

I see the look upon your face,
“She must move on and leave this place.”

Yet I am trapped right here in time.
The song’s the same, as is the rhyme.
I lost my child… Today.’

Netta Wilson