It will be seven years tomorrow. Hunter will have been dead for seven years. Is that a long amount of time? A short amount of time? A significant amount of time?

Within the first year after Hunter died, I was fortunate to speak to a wise man, David Francis, who’d experienced the loss of his adult son. I vividly recall our phone call while I was in the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport waiting for a flight out west. He said it had taken seven years after his son died before he found a sense of happiness in his life again. I’m paraphrasing, but I remember that time frame: seven years.

For the past six months, I’ve been focused on the seven-year milestone. The anticipation of the milestone is often worse than the day itself. I’ll tell you tomorrow if that’s true this year. What is true this year is that I do finally find happiness in living. I have built a new life that is not fundamentally founded on Hunter being alive. It’s a new life staked in the present. It’s a life that isn’t based on a particular vision for my kids’ lives.

I didn’t even realize until a few years after Hunter died how I’d led my life with the primary goal of having my children become ‘independent adults,’ the definition of which included a college education, a professional career, a fine group of friends, financial security, loving partners and grandchildren. Frankly, this wasn’t something I even overtly thought or said. It was assumed. Their lives would be full of opportunity. We, their parents, would work our asses off to ensure they could springboard from our home into their independent life.

OK. I knew there were such things as accidents; those are statistical risks. But developing life goals, getting an education, and avoiding drug addiction had to be due primarily to parental oversight, right? I thought that I not only had influence but assumed that with sufficient effort as a parent, I could ensure this outcome for them and, therefore, for me. Not so, then. Not so, now. Influence, yes. Assurance, no.

So, it will be seven years tomorrow, that Hunter died. That’s seven years of learning to accept the reality of his death. That’s seven years of missing him. It’s a life that now incorporates his loss and finds new ways of living each day.

Ingrid

December 3, 2023
6 years and 364 days