A Year Without Charlie, A Year of Love: Grief, and the people that showed up anyway.

A year ago today, at 2pm, we took Charlie's life support away. I wish I could justify why. Why we just watched the colour drain from his flesh. It doesn't make sense. There's the logic; that he was in pain, he was never going to heal. His body wanted to go. And then there are my mumma arms that I wish I could have used to bundle him up and run. But I didn't. I sat there and explained his dying to Gracie. I touched the arm of the nurse, reassuring her that it was ok; she could end his life. And we watched for seven minutes as he gasped for air, desperately seeking us amidst the onslaught of instinct.

As 2pm approached today, the trauma was not as acute as that awful, nightmarish day. But I had a sense, that I was to relive it, as I retraced what we did that day and the clock ticked steadily towards the end. And it came, we howled, and it went. And he was still gone.

Charlie's birthday was beautiful. So complex but in many ways I had fun. There was a direction in which to channel his love. The party hats, balloons, cupcakes, bubbles. I truthfully felt like celebrating him and his existence, even if fleeting. His death day though, took me by surprise. There is no silver lining. This day, a year ago, I hope, was the worst day of my entire life and thinking on it now, I don't understand how I left him cold in a room, and went and ate chinese takeaway around a table. I don't understand how I walked away, how I continued breathing, continued existing. But you just do.

This morning, I drove past the ocean. I knew choosing his playlist was risky if I wanted to get out at the other end in public but I wanted to choose him today. I hadn't even arrived and I was a mess. The wild weather was uncannily like the drizzly, wild weather we had the day he died and echoed my bleakness as I stared blankly out the windows.

And yet, when I drove past the ocean, the rays of light from the rising sun, speared through the clumps of cloud and sprayed across the crests of waves. I felt him then. In the truest form. My mood bolstered, I went on a run and a swim and had coffee. And I spread his love by paying some coffees forward in his name. I drove home, on the way picking up some beautiful flowers, from another beautiful ray of sunshine and I sat on her front step as I read the note, "some days you need a reminder of how special you are to others so thank you for being that for me." I burst into tears and thought, as I was driving home, that's the silver lining.

Since Charlie died, the love and kindness shown by people close to us, and further away, even strangers, has filled me with gratitude. It still often arrives unexpectedly and with force; not a fleeting acknowledgement, not an 'oh that's nice' but deep, weighty gratitude, reminding me that even in grief, love exists just as strongly. I can't even list all the moments during the last year and the last two weeks but it's the flowers delivered or created, the meals dropped around, the offers to look after Gracie for a bit, the self-care packages, the cheese boards, the vouchers, the cards, the popping around with a drink to share in his garden, the remembering even with a simple emoji or a 'thinking of you.' It's the, "I missed Charlie today" or the "I saw him in a rainbow this morning." It's the "Can I look in his photo album? Who do you think he looks like more? Mum or Dad?" It's the little gifts; "I saw this, and thought of Charlie." It's being at the end of the phone, when I've called you for the thousandth time, in crisis. It's allowing me to talk, to trauma dump, to be an ear.

There has been countless of these. And I'm so full of love for you. You know who you are. I'm so full of love and I've seen the beauty in people and that beauty in the depths of grief, is never forgotten. It's treasured, just as Charlie is, forever and ever. If you've held space for me, for us, in whatever capacity that looks like over the last year, if you've sent me a message to let me know you're thinking of us, or him, in whatever way that is, you're an incredible gem and you will never be forgotten.

Charlie's death gifted me this. Unfortunately, it often takes crashing at the gates of grief to experience such an outpouring of love. But it's changed me. I want to pass it on, because being on the receiving end shows you just how powerful it is when someone is brave enough to reach into your grief. Loving Charlie, and us, has given me an ineffable comfort, that I'll tuck into the folds of my grief and allow it to soften the edges.

If you are my silver lining, my check in, my 'Happy Birthday Charlie' my 'sending you love,' my sender of flowers, cards and chocolates, my 'let's get you out of the house,' my turn up with an esky of drinks, my gratitude for you is as vast as my pain, as my love. I love that Charlie did that. I have such immense Mumma Bear pride; that my little forever two week old has managed to leave little footprints on so many different hearts.

Forever love and gratefulness, to Charlie's star and back x