It pains me to think that if we had let him have his phone upstairs, someone could have talked him out of it. Just another what-if that we have to live with for the rest of our lives.

 

Everything is separated by "before" and "after" now.

 

Yesterday was a decent day. I made it to the grocery store for the first time after... It was our first time to church since after..first time cooking lunch since after. We played Monopoly with Wesley and I managed to make it through the day without a breakdown.

 

Someone we'd never met brought us a meal and she chatted about life on her land, milking her cows and working in her flower gardens, which made me want a flower garden but definitely not cows.

 

Aside from Wesley getting some sort of stomach bug in the afternoon, it was a decent day.

 

Today, however, is hard. I miss Julian so much. It's only been a little over two weeks but he seems so far away. I took some time in his room to read the memories people wrote about him at his service. They made me smile, laugh, and cry. And they gave me a small glimpse at some of the beautiful ways Julian loved people and made them feel seen and heard.

 

He wasn't scared to befriend the unpopular and he loved to make someone's day a little brighter. Some memories I had heard before and some I had not.

 

One of our favorite memories to tell is about the Carolina Reaper Pepper. Last year, a teacher had told him that he would eat a Carolina reaper pepper if they did something in class (I can't remember what) so Julian convinced me to buy a package of them off Amazon. He brought it to school to give to the teacher but offered the other one to a kid at recess. The sweet kid put the whole thing in his mouth and then had to go to the hospital.

 

Julian got in school suspension for it and was so angry at the injustice of that because he didn't force it on anyone. Noy and I scolded him and then laughed about it behind closed doors (not because he sent a kid to the hospital, just because the whole thing is funny).

 

Julian would never purposefully hurt someone, except for himself I guess. Oh, to have one more day with my sweet boy and tell him how much I love him and that whatever he was going through would be okay.

 

Tell your kids that suicide is NEVER the answer. Spell out the devastating ripple effect of that single action. Don't shy away from the subject because this problem is not going away. Tell them it's not an honorable or brave way to go and there is help out there. And NEVER, EVER, EVER end a conversation with anything other than "I love you."

 

Thanks for listening to my random Monday ramblings.

 

xo

Dawn