Everything Has Changed

Kobi,

When you died, I knew that things wouldn't be the same. I also knew, I couldn't let them be the same. If you were going to be gone, things had to be different. I couldn't walk in my front door that you walked through many times before. I couldn't sit on the floor of my living room that we opened presents on for many years before. I simply couldn't.

But mostly, I couldn't stare at that spot where my friend held me as I sobbed while waiting for Casey to get home from work after I found out it was you. I couldn't stand in the spot in front of my kitchen counter where I opened up the website that had a picture of your apartment complex with "Body Found" on the front page. I couldn't sleep in my bed, by the spot where I doubled over and screamed when they said, "The deceased does have those characteristics." Like you were some lost pet I was describing. I couldn't do these things. I didn't have it in me to just remember the good. I was too traumatized. I was in too much pain.

So after I identified your body, after I viewed you in your casket, after I drove away from you for the last time you were above ground, I started looking. I looked for a new home for my family. I looked for a safe home. Somewhere that you hadn't stepped foot in, somewhere that possible suspects wouldn't know where we were. And I found one. Buying a new home in a new school district meant that we would be leaving our friends, neighbors, and everything we had come to know. It was scary, and frightening. The girls had friends there, I loved their teachers, I loved my friends, and I loved being a Girl Scout leader to my troop, but most of all, I loved you.

 I thought about it long and hard. If it was the right move for the girls. If uprooting everything they knew would do more damage than their hearts had already experienced, but then I thought back to my own experiences. I was the girl whose father completed suicide. Feeling like that title and that trauma haunted me in every classroom and everything I ever did. I didn't want my girls to be the girls whose uncle was murdered. And in the tiny town that we lived in, that's exactly who they would have been. Rather or not they meant it maliciously wouldn't have mattered. It would have been a scar for the world to see. It also would have been hard walking into a school that you and I grew up in. Existing under a roof you once existed under. Seeing both of our classmates in the hallway and your nieces playing with their kids. Trying to forget playing on the playground with you so I can be strong and celebrate my kids accomplishments. It was all too much for me, and I didn't want it all to be too much for them.

So we packed up our stuff, and your stuff, and we moved over a county, to a new district, a new neighborhood, an entirely new life. I have lost a lot in the past 5 months. None of them even compare to the scar of losing you, but all of it added together has been a lot to adjust to. My life is entirely different from what it was 5 months ago, in several different ways. But you are the biggest missing piece, a piece of my border. The piece that makes me, me. I don't even know who I am anymore, and it isn't because of my location, so much of me was you.

Our daily conversations, the way I thought, the way I acted, everything I did in some way, had to do with you. I told you about everything, the big, small, bad, good, and the ugly, even the really ugly. Now all of that conversation, all of that friendship is gone. It's an empty void in my life. It's there in the mornings when I would be on the phone with you while driving, on my lunch breaks when I needed you to convince me that I don't suck at being a mother or my job, during my drive home when I would call you to tell you all about my day, and in the evenings, when Casey was at work and I needed adult conversation, and you needed to vent. I worried about you constantly, too. The silence of all the space you use to take up, is more painful than I can describe. It pushes me to tears, to the floor, and into a depression unlike I've ever known before.

Everything in my life has changed, and it isn't for the better. I miss you, and love you so very much.

Sissy