You wake up in the morning and for the first few hazy seconds, you think maybe it was all a bad dream. As soon as you get out of bed, a tidal wave of grief knocks you down, bringing you to your knees, and you immediately start to cry. You can’t stop crying. This is the beginning of the end of your life as you knew it—grieving your child who is no longer alive. Whether it was a long goodbye, a short goodbye, or no goodbye, you want the pain to stop but you don’t think it ever will.

How could it? How will you go on? Why should you go on? Everything has turned to s--t. Things will never be the same. You will never be the same. Your child has died and a part of you has, too. Your world has gone from color to black and white, though it’s mostly just pitch black. The light—your darling son, your beautiful daughter—is gone forever and you’re left alone, stumbling in the dark.

You drag yourself into the shower and try to wash the anguish away. You scrub and scrub until it hurts and then you scrub some more until you burst out crying again. The shower is one of the few refuges where you can let go, where you can turn your insides out. The shower cleanses your body but can’t purify your soul.

You get dressed, unaware that you’re wearing two different colored shoes, and look in the mirror to see if you’re still in one piece. It surprises you that you are. But there’s something different about your eyes. They’re dull and lifeless, like one of those zombies on The Walking Dead. You wonder if people can see the sorrow in your eyes, or the hole in your heart, or the bottomless pit in your stomach, and then you wonder if they can see you at all.

You eat a light breakfast because the barely rational part of you knows that you need to keep up your strength, but everything tastes awful. Really, everything has no taste at all. You have no appetite for anything—least of all, for your life.

The phone rings and you jump out of your skin before realizing that there’s no longer a reason to ever do that again. You still have the coroner’s voicemail to prove it. This time, it’s just a little PTSD calling to say hello.

You hop in the car and begin to cry again because this is your other fortress of solitude. You think this is where you do your best crying—the deep, guttural, ugly kind that barely........

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