You know it has been a long time since you have been to the cemetery. When it takes you 3 trips around to find Connor’s stone. I finally found it. I’m sure the people walking in the cemetery were wondering what that crazy woman in the blue SUV was doing. Something about the snow just disoriented me. Or it’s just easier, and honestly more truthful to say. “I don’t go there often, it causes a huge crying jag, and the irrational desire to get on my knees and dig the plot up.

To prove to me and everyone else he really isn’t in there. That this is just a bad dream, that I somehow can’t wake up from. I say irrational because I know it is, and it is not something that I would ever do. But seeing that beautiful piece of shiny black granite with his name and the engraved baseball on it makes it real every time.

Not that it isn’t real, because it is. There are no half tied Chippewa boots by my front door, dirty laundry in front of the laundry chute. I’m not missing half of my utensils that have migrated to his room, and my refrigerator stays fairly full, and no one puts a gallon of milk back in there with a tablespoon in the bottom of it. Rather than be the one that throws it away.

As I sat and watched it snow today, I knew that if he was still here, he wud have gotten out of work, grabbed those twin tips, his boots and helmet and headed to the mountain. He was an incredible skier, he had no fear, which only made him better. He could traverse the mountain if he wanted to, but why would you. He would rather come down at breakneck speed, or ski under the lifts, or on closed trails.

There are so many things I miss, little things, like his inability to get his clothes DOWN the laundry chute, when it was right outside his bedroom door. The fact that buying jeans for the boy was a project. With a 28” waist and 32” long legs he was an anomaly. His game face, the one that he wore every time he stepped on that field. How he took the game of baseball so seriously, and got so frustrated when some of his teammates did not. How he loved you with everything he had, he was a hopeless romantic, and a good ole boy all wrapped into one package.

My Connor, who will forever be 17, as I watch all his friends age, get married, have kids, move away. In my mind he is off somewhere doing those things. But in reality he stopped aging 11/17/17, months shy of his 18th birthday. That is a reality that is hard to swallow, like a bitter pill that gets stuck without enough water to wash it down. There will never be enough water to wash this one down…NEVER.