You asked how I’m feeling. You heard that a child passed away in the neighborhood, under similar circumstances to my own son’s petirah a few years back. You wondered how it’s affecting me and if it’s bringing up all these memories for me, putting me back there all over again.
The short answer is no.
The long answer is that it takes me back to shortly after my son’s petirah, when my sister, in an effort to console me, shared that not a day goes by when she doesn’t think about my son. I took that to mean that she only thinks about him once a day. As for myself, I wasn’t going more than five minutes without something triggering a memory or an emotion.
Baruch Hashem, as the years go on, Hashem does give a form of a nechamah of forgetfulness, and I can go an hour or so without thinking about him. But I don’t need a child to pass away to remember my own. He’s top of mind throughout the day.
Someone shared with me that parents who have lost a child think about the child who passed on more than their living children. Unfortunately, that’s so true. There are so many times that memories of my son are triggered. Sometimes it’s because his classmate passes by me, or I hear someone else calling their child by the same name. There are times of year like family milestones, Yamim Tovim, and dates connected to his life like his yahrtzeit, his birthday, Yizkor, and other occasions.
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