Was Nick ever here?

Or was he just a dream?

Tony and I have agreed that we’ve come to the same spot in our grieving process which has the potential to be both comforting and completely terrifying all at the same time. We’re beginning to wonder if Nick’s whole life was just a dream. Was he ever really here?

Did I hold him as an infant, teach him to throw a ball, watch him run the bases – or did I imagine it all? I know I imagined him as a preteen; being a nuisance, riding bikes through the neighborhood with kids, staying out all afternoon at a friend’s house. I know I imagined him in high school; running track, playing tennis with me in the summers, bringing home a sweet girlfriend, running down the football field with an intercepted pass. I know I imagined him in college, getting his degree, getting married, falling in love with his first born – a daughter…

But now it seems that his whole life has falling into the same storeroom in my brain. Was he ever who I thought he was? I only knew of him what he told me and confided in me, but what was in his head that he kept to himself? And since it all has the same fog around it, all the images are similar and I no longer know what’s real and what’s imagined.

Sometimes I truly feel like his whole life was a dream – as if I wanted Cody to have a brother so badly, I just dreamed one up and made him in my mind to be perfect and the best match for Cody that could possibly be manufactured who would love him, protect him and care for him when I couldn’t be around. I wanted someone to love Selah perfectly and completely so I imagined someone who loved her through and through; someone who would view her tantrums as tolerable and her baby-isms as humorous.

In a way it’s helpful because it removes some of the hurt to think that he never was- to think that my crazy mind just made him up. How can I miss someone who never was? To think of him as a dream that’s ended makes the pain less intense.

But then I hear the stories of how he touched other’s lives and the memories they have of him. I look at the photos again and that crazy smile and I have to actually convince myself that he must have been. He was so uniquely himself that I could not have made him up to be the boy he was.

So, is this just another “safety valve” – a way for my system to temporarily “shut down” so that I can have a break? Is it just another style of numbness? Or is it a permanent “forgetfulness” and just the beginning to the long road of forgetting Nick and who he is and how much he loved?

I guess I’ll find out later. For now, I have live with what is. What “is” are moments of being so sure he’s going to walk through the door that I feel I must hurry to get his snack prepared – coupled with moments of wondering if he’s only an illusion. What an odd life this fleshly body confines us to!!!