As we approach your brother's first birthday, I find myself thinking a lot about you. Of course, I think about you every day, in different ways. Sometimes it's reflecting on what you might look like, or behave. Sometimes it's about what your first word would have been, or when you'd have started to walk. Sometimes it's to simply miss you, to yearn to hold you with all of my being.
Lately I've been thinking a lot about love. Because I love you and Barney with equal power and equal amounts - but I don't love you in quite the same way. I can't, you see. My love for you is abstract. It builds up inside me, but there's no release for it, no home for it to go to. I keep my love for you with me, and sometimes I feel like I might burst from it. Like my grief, occasionally I take it out and give it an airing. Concentrate on it, focus my thoughts. Give it the space my love needs and deserves.
My love for Barney is different. It too is overwhelming, but I can show it every single day. Every kiss, hug, laugh, everything I do for him. The games we play and the things we teach one another. And having him hasn't minimised my love for you, or made it insignificant. The capacity to love is limitless - my heart expanded to love him too. It encompasses you both.
The note I left in your coffin promised that I would keep your memory, and your love, safe inside of me until the day I die. And I will, my precious first son, always. You gave me so many gifts, and my gift to you is simply to love you, forever. It feels like a meagre gift to give to you, the boy who changed my life, but it's all I can do for you. I just hope it's enough.
