Yesterday made one month since my little brother's death, and it hit hard. How could it be a month already? My world shattered that day. How could life have managed to continue for a whole month now?! Life stopped for me, but the world has gone on. It's not right. It's disrespectful. Yet, the world has continued for a whole month. The sun has risen and set 28 times since February 27, 2015, like nothing ever happened, yet my life will never be the same.
I feel so conflicted. I just want to curl up in a ball and sleep until I wake up and find that it was all a bad dream, but I have children and a job, so I force myself out of bed each morning and into my daily routine. If I stay busy enough, I can pretend all is well, but in the quiet times--in the quiet times--my soul screams out that all is not well, that all will never be well again. I feel as if I have betrayed him if I smile for a moment or truly enjoy a moment. I feel as if I have failed my children and students if I don't continue to be myself. One of the most difficult things, though, is that the rest of the world goes on as if nothing ever happened. A piece of my soul died, yet the earth continues to rotate on its axis. It hurts to breathe, but the sun comes up anyway.
It feels disrespectful to continue with "life as normal"--the new, empty normal. I want to scream at the world, "Don't you know what you've lost?" But they don't. How could they? They don't know, but I do. Every day, I feel the weight of that loss again.
