6 Months

Dear Stevie,
6 months. Wow, I really can't believe it. You've been gone an entire half a year. Have I really made it through 182 days without you?

There have been days where I do nothing but sit on the couch in a zombie-like state, and others where I have this incredible drive and energy unlike anything I've felt before, and all I want to do is "go, go, go."

I've had times where I cry so hard I laugh, and others where I laugh so hard I cry.

I've spent hours cursing God for taking you from me, and I've spent hours secretly crying out his name in the darkness of the night.

I've lost a few friends that I thought would stick around, and I've made many new ones who I know will be there forever.

I've felt silly for caring so much, and guilty for not caring enough.

I've had many moments where I think I'm such a failure, and many where I feel like I'm the strongest person I know.

If anything, the last 182 days have taught me what its like to really feel. Happiness, sadness, anger, jealously, guilt, hope, strength, weakness, peace, bitterness, vulnerability, empathy, excitement, confusion, clarity, apathy, passion, sorrow, joy, hate, love. I've experienced them all, sometimes at the same time.

The painful emotions cut deeper than they ever have before, but you know what? The emotions on the other side of the spectrum--things like passion, strength, love--I feel them with such intensity now. It's like my capacity for feeling has expanded 10-fold. When I'm sad, I'm sadder than I knew was possible 182 days ago. But when I love, boy do I love so much deeper.

Andrea once explained it as a sort of pendulum theory. On the left you have sadness, sorrow, despair, all those icky emotions. On the right, you have happiness, joy, love, passion, strength, all those 'good emotions.' When you died, the pendulum swung so far to the left, farther than its ever gone before. But now it also swings farther to the right. Before you, my pendulum was kind of stuck in the middle most of the time, and now, it swings so far in both directions.

I recently saw this quote from Harlan Ellison somewhere: "I know that pain is the most important thing in the universes . . . For without pain, there can be no pleasure. Without sadness, there can be no happiness. Without misery there can be no beauty. And without these, life is endless, hopeless, doomed and damned."

These last 6 months have been hard, no doubt about it. But in the last 182 days I have felt more than a lot of people ever feel in a lifetime. And in a strange, hard to explain way, that's something to be thankful for, I guess.

I love you so much, beautiful little girl. You've changed me forever.


Love,
Mom