My Love, My Sunshine (Chanlix)[ COMPLETED]

12

Felix Dad POV:

Being a parent has been the most rewarding - and the most painful experience of my life. I can hardly imagine what my life would be like if I had not been a parent.

The sun is shining. It's noon. I'm in bed, again feeling gratitude that I'm not the only one this could have happened to. It's a terrible and pathetic thought. However true. At least we are not alone. I don’t always stay in bed all day or until noon every day. I do have a life. Although not the same. It’s permanently different. I still laugh. And I cry.

Our children are our dreams. We have other dreams but our children are here to outlive us. To give us hope for them. We make them. Grow them. Birth them, guide them. We hope and dream for them to be maybe just somehow happier and more successful at this life than we are/were. It's nature.

The smell of disinfectant awakened memories long forgotten, echoes of those long ago hospital visits have jarred my mind. Suddenly being forced to swim once more in the tide waters of the past. These painful memories, they're just the same as nightmares.

When I first found out my lix was not going to be well and was weak, I had promised myself to cure him. With multiple failed attempts. The doctor had said the symptoms will be showing on anytime and he won’t live long after that. I knew when it started it would break me. I knew that there was too much below deck not to shatter my carefully laid floor when it came up.

Breaking was hard, recovery almost impossible, but of my journey I am making the best map I possibly can. Drawing it out the way I do helps, painting it in fine oils daily. Emotional pain is hard, but using in a way that helps others feels like stabbing the devil in the heart.

If we hear with our hearts, we can care and not scare, we can heal and bring ointment to invisible wounds in the hope they can be reduced to scars and fade in time.
I had never felt so alone, so lost... So incapable of doing even the smallest tasks.

And this was only the beginning, the beginning of the pain, the suffering and the endless Congo line of emotions that were in store for me.

I never experienced grief this bad before. Every memory played like a song in my head, repeating itself for what seemed like forever. I was lost mostly because I had lost a big part of me. I couldn't get that part back and I wanted it as bad as my life depended on it but it was all gone, vanished in thin air.
I could write a million letters, each one the same as the last in sentiment and cadence. They stay the same, only the word arrangement changes. It boils down to one thing, I miss him. He should be here.

Ultimately, no one knows if that is selfish or not and even if it is, to hell with the rest of the world and their opinions. Felix should be here. I miss him. My heart is missing an integral piece, a part that keeps it from working correctly. When will I let go?

I suddenly remember his funeral.

We were stood at the front of the funeral. Everyone's heads were down. Maybe it was them showing respect of maybe there were too afraid to look at what was coming. The coffin was pulled from the hearse by six strong men, all wearing suits. The silence had dwelled as they entered the church. It was wobbling as they carried it to the front and gently placed it down.

I held my wife's shaky hand the whole time. She wiped tears onto her sleeve and rested on my shoulder. I kept it together until they passed a picture of him to everyone and that's when all the memories came flooding back like a tidal wave. His face seemed so alive and happy and I couldn't help but wonder what he looked like under that closed wooden box. I stared blankly at it hoping that a miracle would happen and he would rise again and come back to the world, come back to us. But nothing happened. He was gone.

To enter the cemetery I must skirt around a pile of brown frosted leaves, the innumerable flashing fragments shine in the brilliant wintry light, for today there is no weather; no wind, no cloud, just subzero temperatures. Even the leaf stems lie white and sharp. Ahead the path glistens like white quartz, yet ice crystals on weary concrete is all it is. All this beauty over everything dead. And here I am to add to it with a bunch of pink roses in my gloved hand. I pause, my breath rising in visible puffs, then I remember why I came. I need to pay my respects before we are separated by six feet of earth, while I can still imagine him whole, lying there as if sleeping.

Struggling to hold back the grief, tears flow steadily, silently down immobile face, feel bruised inside, numbness, emptiness, walking behind mahogany coffin, saying goodbye although she is gone already, the soul unwilling to acknowledge the finality of death, never to look upon their face again or feel their embrace, see the warmth in their eyes, be surrounded by their love. Words from the minister, speeches at the service bring a fresh onslaught of tears, well spoken words, a tribute to their life and loves, everyone in black, dusky pink roses on the casket, watching casket lowered into the grave through tear-stained eyes.

It was more than crying, it was the kids of desolate sobbing that comes from a person drained of all hope. I sank to my knees at the tiny grave, not caring for the damp mud that dirtied my clothes. Then I saw chan. looking sad, very sad. He had this look of sadness in his eyes, in this sadness there is no past or future, just living by the moment. Every day is measured from the moment of waking into this new reality until his body can do no more, until sleep comes to rest this weary mind. He had to believe his baby was safe up there, comfortable and warm. To look down would be to imagine him cold in a box, bereft of his cuddles and goodnight kisses.

The sadness drained through me rather than skating over my skin. It travelled through every cell to reach the ground. I filtered it yet strangely enough, I kept what was pure and it was the dirt that left.

I couldn’t think about the funeral anymore. I am felling this heartache after time I think about it.

My heartache had rung me out until I was dry inside, no more tears would come. My insides still felt as raw as if a winter wind was blowing right through my skin. The last conversation haunted me, taunted me, replaying like an echo. My appetite had dwindled to nothing. I kept the curtains closed so that I wouldn't have to witness life going on as usual. How could it when my world had crumbled?

Sometimes all I feel is grief.

Grief. Feels like emptiness in your heart, a shear of nothingness that somehow takes over and holds your soul and threatens to kill you entirely. It gives you this heavy feeling that’s like the weight of the world is resting on your shoulders and there is nothing you can do to get out from under it. It’s like this hole in your heart that is the shape of the one you lost and that makes you feel the need to wipe away any non-existent tears that you want to form but can’t.

When the words would not come, the tears did. The mourning was supposed to be something dignified and stoic in my family, but I cried like a child, noisily, with running snot and choking sobs and I was not ashamed.