It is now a month since my son died. Leaving a huge void in my heart and I miss him beyond words. I am trying to find a way to live on and keeping his memory alive. He was my best friend. Gifted with abilities to write music, both classical and punk rock. Highly intelligent he could code and did his own compiler when he was 16. We enjoyed nature as I have written in my previous posts. All this is stored in my heart to bring laughter among the tears.
Writing down words on a piece of paper or on a computer screen has been a good way of dealing with things in life. For the last month, even this has been difficult. I have “only” been able to write some poetry. I have started to write this text many times but had stop when the energy ran out.
When someone in your family dies you are not only left with grief and loss. There are also many practical things that needs to be done. Arranging a funeral or ceremony, close of accounts on the internet, cancel contracts and the list goes on. And even if this is hard, I feel that this helps dealing with the loss.
One of the hardest things was to clean out the student apartment. He had a very nice apartment at the Campus that is very hard to get. Every item carries a memory more or less and you need to decide to keep or get rid of. If you keep it. Where to store it?
The hardest part is to close everything of on the internet. My son had just started up a website to sell his music to games and films. The first thing I had to do is to try and stop all ongoing add campaigns. I think I managed to do that but then it got harder. For the accounts I had the logon credentials I managed most. You be surprised how many sites that does not offer an account cancel button. Next option is to try e-mail the companies, but you get stuck with a chatbot that cannot compute the fact the somebody died.
Arranging the funeral was easy as we got help from a funeral director. The church has played a big part in my son life as he played the church organ. Whatever your faith they are very supportive and helpful. My son’s own music was played in the speakers and ended with a recording of the Star Wars theme that he played on that organ at age 15. It was even easy to choose the headstone as my father-in-law found a stone shaped as a heart.
I hope you did not find this post too depressing, if so check out my other post for something more uplifting. We tend to be uncomfortable around death and grief but there is only one thing in life that is certain. We die. Fortunately we do not know when or how.
UlleHaddock 