Dear George

We think about you every day and we miss you dearly.

Your little body lies decaying in the damp earth in a cardboard box that I soaked with tears but you are not there, little boy, you are not there.

You are in every breath that I take, in every laugh and sigh that leaves my lips, every thought that crosses my mind, every thump of blood through my heart, every kiss and hug I give and receive. I breathe you in and out of my lungs each day. Every moment of love is filled to the brim with you.

You are everywhere I go, everywhere I have been and everywhere I will go. You are in the wind and the sea, in the rain, the earth and the clouds, in the trees, the grass and the flowers. You are in everything I touch, smell and taste. You are in the feathers that I find and take home to put in your box and in the silver I wear around my neck and wrist.

In the last three years I have cried for you, longed for you and I have shouted and stamped my feet at the universe with impotent fury on your behalf. I no more accept your death today than I did the moment we knew you had died. I will always rail at the universe for it's wrongness. It is still wrong. It still shouldn't have happened. You should be here. 

My dear little boy, you should be two years and seven months old and this day should mean nothing more than, oh it's only five days until your Granddad's birthday let's go and find a present for him. Today should be an ordinary day.

Today isn't a celebration of your birth and in this house there are no happy birthdays, cards on the mantel or presents to be unwrapped. Today is the day we go on an adventure in your name and celebrate the love that made you, keeps us together and holds us to hope.

Today we are going to catch the sunrise for you.

We wish you could share in our adventures, they would be so much more with you two singing, laughing and dropping crumbs in the back seat of our battered old car. For as long as we live we will always be sad that you are missing from your lives. We fill our life up with love as best we can but there will always be George and Little Poppet shaped gaps that can never be filled.

My dear son,

Beloved son, be love, be light, be free. Scatter you atoms around the universe, zoom along on the tails of comets, swing from stars, whoosh along the rainbows with Little Poppet and maybe think of us from time to time.

Every day I say your name out loud and every night I whisper a bedtime story to myself,

"Once upon a wonder time, through the clouds, in a parallel universe far far away on the other side of the rainbow, there lived a little boy. There lived a little boy. A little boy who lived..."

I kiss you goodnight in my mind.

I love you George.