For my daughter on her birthday: year 19...It still hurts.

Once again we arrive at my yearly ongoing therapy blog entry...which this year comes a whopping four months after my last blog entry in June.  Guess my life hasn't been interesting enough to comment on through the midsection of 2015.  Probably just as well in the end.

So here we are at her 19th birthday.  I imagine that had she lived she would either be in the throes of being in her second year at college, working her tail off at a job, or maybe in the military.  It's hard to picture that if you haven't been through the process of having to do what her mother and I did way back in 1996, in that give her a sweet 16, high school graduation party and her eventual marriage featuring me walking her down the aisle and giving her away to her future husband.

All that took place with the funeral we gave for her on November 4th 1996.

So have things gotten easier in nineteen years for me?  Well, yes and no.

Anyone who has been through this will tell you that though the edge of the pain does go away over time it never ever leaves.  Yesterday (two days ago now) her mother, brother and I went out to the cemetery for our annual pilgrimage and I opened myself to whatever emotion that I was holding bakc and very little, if anything happened, which I suppose is a good thing.  This far away it's hard even to imagine the time frame of the mid 90s when her mother and I were expecting her, let alone how I feel about losing her when it happened.

Since then I have acquired two friends who have experienced death of their children and I am the only one of the three of us who lost their child before it was born.  Regardless of that, the "club of parents who have lost children is not age exclusive.  One friend of mine lost her so to a fast-acting disease when he was an infant and the other lost his grown son to an automobile accident at age 19.

Though they were all gone they were supposed to have seen us take our final breaths in life and sent us on our way as old people and that didn't happen.  With them around as friends of mine has been therapeutic but we are all working through is day by day, hour by hour, and minute by minute.

So as we turn another page and begin her 20th year more healing will take place.  I still hate not having her here, but I know she looks after her brother and her mom and I.  

Happy Birthday to my sweet Angel.

Daddy misses you.

Angel Cherub Lohman

Born at rest, 10/31/96.