It's a new year.
We have now been without you for 2 years. There are times when that's unfathomable. Other times, it seems you've been gone for a decade, I miss you the same either way. Either way, the passing time is not healing this wound. There are too many components involved in my grief. I lost you. Not to natural causes, which would have been easier to accept. But to a vicious homicide. The tactics were abhorrent. I cannot erase the image I was accidentally shown during the trial.
I suspect I will NEVER erase that image from my memory. It was so shocking. Not only because I saw the awful awful end to your amazing presence, but also because it opened my eyes to the method your SON, my nephew, took to end your life. I think now that he had been calculating this for a long, long time. Gone was the boy I watched grow into a young man. In his place, sitting by his attorney, was this boy, in a man's body. A boy with vacant eyes. There was zero emotion. I could hardly look at him, although we were within arms reach for the entire week. Exhausting. The loose bandage over my gaping wound was savagely ripped away, walking through the door the first day. My knees were weak. My soul more so.
And now, I'm trying to remove that horror, to see in front of me only. You can imagine how tough that is... I can't seem to find a speck of closure, I'm swimming in the negative, I didn't say goodbye. I wasn't even convinced you were really gone, nothing to prove you wouldn't walk in tomorrow with jelly jars in hand. Would you?
I'll always feel a sense of guilt, for being 'too busy' to see you the week before you died. If only....
