Sucker Punched

You just never know when grief will throw you a sucker punch! You can be going along just fine then POW! Right up the gob, grief pimp slaps you!

Martin, Andrew’s Pat, and I were helping Denise move into her new place in Bradenton, the next town over. After I dropped Martin and Pat off at our house, because Martin had to work & Pat had to go home, I went on ahead to Denise’s new place to get gas at a cheaper price by her new place. I get the gas, while cheaper, still too damn expensive, and head on to what I thought was my merry way. I make my turn and look for my next turn. I missed it. I decided instead of turning around, I went up and took the next street. I figured I’d run into her street no probs & find her new place. Simple right? Not so much!

What I found instead was quite unexpected. I found The Shannon FUNeral Home! :-( The place where we had Andrew’s service. I was shocked. How’d that get there?! It was a place I never wanted to see again and it is right up the street from Denise! I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t of missed my turn. She didn’t even know it was walking distance to her house! Granted, she is behind the Shannon and you wouldn’t see it unless you came in from State Rd 41. We came in from State Rd 301. I recognized this place from behind. I landed on the road behind it! I guess I remember more than I thought of that day. I mean, to recognize this place from behind? Wow! That even surprised me.

I was glad that the Shannon was in Bradenton because I knew I wouldn’t ever have to see it again. Yea, the jokes on me! I didn’t want to use a place that was close by because I didn’t want to be driving by it, constantly being reminded of my loss. I wanted to be able to focus more on who Andrew is now.

I sat there and stared at this place that took care of my son’s body, as the tears welled up in my eyes. I was feeling all kinds of emotions because I knew what “took care” of Andrew meant. As much as I hate to admit this, because it was such a muggle thing to do, I looked at the building behind the Shannon, where they… where they…where they cremated my baby boy. Where they took my handsome, 6ft tall, beautiful boy and reduced him to ash. :-( It became very real for me again. I hated this place for what they did to my Andrew’s body, but deeply appreciated what they did for us. They were very good to us.

There was part of me that went into a JD (from Scrubs) moment and got out of my car running and screaming at this place taking a sledge hammer to the back building. I then realized that staring at this place and feeling the loss intensely wasn’t doing me any good so I proceeded to find Denise’s place again. So I drove on in a daze.

Once I found Denise’s new place, I sat in her back yard waiting for everybody and let the tears flow. It was a gorgeous, sunny, cool, day today and her back yard has a lot of trees. So I tried to release the emotions of grief to Mother Nature, from one Mother to another, & bask in her energy and the beautiful day.

So what started out as a pretty good day laughing with Martin and Pat, along with Nick and his friend, all loading the truck together, ended up with me being in a weird space, feeling my deep loss, trying to sort out these emotions.

I have to say, going to work and having everybody being happy to see me and telling me I was missed, helped. Then I went for a jog when I got home after work. Yup! I moved all day, went to work lifting heavy bus tubs for football Sunday, and still had the energy to go for a jog when I got home. I had to run off the energy of today. Now that I have blogged it, I think this was the final thing I needed to do to move through this.

IT’S ALL GOOD!