For Joseph on your 17th birthday..

Joseph,

I’ve sat here for such a long time staring at a blank screen, wondering how to find possibly find the words to write your birthday letter this year when there are no tales from your sixteenth year, no anecdotes of embarrassing incidents to look back on, no photographs of you and your siblings, albeit with your eyes rolling and a phone in your hand. I should be sat here sharing my worries about you starting your driving lessons and using your big brothers fake ID to sneak into the clubs in town, not sitting here wondering how we made it through another long year without you.

Every year I tell myself that perhaps this is the year your birthday will feel easier, that the waves of grief won’t quite consume me, that the ripples of loss will merely lap at my feet. Every year I tell myself that maybe this is the year I will reach a point of acceptance, where I let go of my anger and the overwhelming sadness and simply concede that these were the cards we have been dealt. And yet every year my grief takes me by surprise, shaking my entire world for the month of July, and reminds me that with every passing year you are further away than you have ever been.

And that thought terrifies me.

It’s been a funny old year somehow, learning to navigate your siblings milestones and loosen the reins a little, all whilst reeling from the emotions which that triggers. I’ve found myself mourning both the loss of you and the parent I might have been had you still been here. I wonder if perhaps I would have worried a little less, if I’d have been more confident of my decisions a little more; I wonder if I’d have given the five of you the freedom to grow without feeling as though my heart was literally breaking inside my chest.

I sometimes think the not knowing is the hardest part of losing you my darling boy and seventeen years on it still takes my breath away that I don’t have a reason why you couldn’t stay. It destroys me that I’ll never know what your first word would have been, how tall you would have grown, whether you’d be sporty or academic, quiet like Eva or completely wild like Lew. It makes me so sad that you’ll never know your siblings and that they’ll never know you, and often my favourite day dream will be thoughts of the five of you together, imagining the different dynamics, the moments you’d share, the possibility that I could be the kind of parent who has never known such sadness or experienced such grief.

I imagine you and Lewis would have been thick as thieves at seventeen and nineteen, the years of childhood bickering a distant memory and in its place an unbreakable bond fuelled by a shared love of FiFA and drunken antics. I can just imagine the two of you creased over laughing about a night out you’d had or a party you’d been to and how I’d roll my eyes and tell you I didn’t want to know as you’d disappear back into your bedrooms cracking another “you had to be there” joke.

I imagine how you and Eva would have had the most beautiful bond, the first little sister to grace your life and utterly impossible not to love. How you and Megs would have had the most fun together as she showered you with love and completely tormented you in equal measure. I imagine, just like Lew, you would have had a special soft spot for Harry – the baby of our family – who I am certain would have been your absolute double at the same age. I imagine my three brown eyed boys together and how random cashiers at the supermarket would comment “Oh aren’t they all like you!” and I’d say “They’re their Mama’s boys alright!” as I burst with pride. I imagine five little faces growing up around the dining table, on Christmas morning, birthdays, holidays and regular Mondays.

I imagine, I imagine……

One thing I don’t need to imagine is just how much they would have loved you Joseph because I see that every single day. I see it in the sadness in Lewis’s eyes when we visit your grave together, in the brightest star in the sky in all of Eva’s drawings, in the writing in the sand Megan etches on every holiday, and in Harry’s whispered words at bedtime as he asks why you wouldn’t stay. And I also know that you’d have loved them too because they’re pretty amazing kids Joseph, but perhaps you already know that. I really hope you do.

Happy 17th Birthday Joseph Allan, we love and miss you all the stars in the sky.

Don’t forget, we’ll see you at sunset.

Mum

xxxxx