I still mother them….

I have been trying to figure out why this August feels so different.

Overdose Awareness Month has always been sad for me. How could it not be?

Every day I post another face. Another name. Another birthday. Another date somebody died. Another family missing somebody they would give anything to have back.

And every year, mixed in with all of those faces, is Vincent.

My son.

And Monday is his birthday.

Another birthday without him. Another year of figuring out how old he would be. Another day that is supposed to be happy that just isn’t.

But this year there is Gabriella too.

And I don’t even know how to explain what that does to my grief.

For almost nine years, I knew how to miss Vincent.

I hated it. I never accepted it. But I knew this grief. I knew its corners. I knew the dates that would knock me down. I knew what his birthday felt like. I knew what August felt like.

And then Gabriella died.

Now I am learning grief all over again.

My daughter.

His sister.

And suddenly even my grief for Vincent feels different because she was part of it.

She missed him too.

She talked about him. She carried him. She grieved him. She knew what losing him did to all of us because she was standing right there in the middle of it with me.

She was his sister, but he was also her person.

For all these years, when I missed Vincent, at least Gabriella was still here to miss him with me.

Now she isn’t.

That’s the part I still can’t wrap my head around.

I look at pictures from years ago and there they both are.

My kids.

We were all at the beach 14 years ago. Just living our lives. I didn’t know I was looking at something I would someday give anything to have back.

I didn’t know there would come a day when I would be the mother looking at that picture without either of them here.

How is that my life?

Seriously. How?

Most days none of it feels real.

Sometimes I still want to call Gabriella and tell her something about Vincent. I want to hear her complain about her day. I want to talk about something stupid. I want to hear her voice.

And then it hits me all over again.

She’s gone too.

There are moments when I think about them being together and I desperately want to believe that they are. That she found her baby brother. That somehow, somewhere, the two of them are together again.

But I’m still their mother.

And I want them here.

I want them here with me.

That’s the truth.

People tell you grief changes with time. Maybe it does.

But nobody tells you what happens when grief gets grief added to it.

When the person who stood beside you through one unimaginable loss becomes another unimaginable loss.

When one empty chair becomes two.

When you have two children you have to talk about in the past tense.

I spend so much of my life talking about hope. Recovery. Harm reduction. Narcan. Ending stigma. Keeping people alive.

I believe in every bit of it.

I will keep doing this work.

I will keep posting the faces.

I will keep saying their names.

I will keep telling people that the person they love matters.

But I also need to be allowed to say that this hurts.

This August hurts.

Monday is Vincent’s birthday, and somehow I have to face his birthday for the first time without Gabriella here too.

I don’t know what that is going to feel like.

I don’t know how I’m supposed to make sense of losing both of them.

I don’t have a lesson in this tonight.

I don’t have some beautiful way to wrap it up.

I just miss my kids.

Both of them.

And right now, that is the most honest thing I can say.