I am staring out the rain-streaked windows of one of our favourite places watching the snow become as heavy as my heart feels today.

I am surrounded by scraps of you: casings and bullets and targets from shooting practice in the front yard of this cabin, a paper plate you used to draw a cartoon about Axel (the dog), your “most spirited” medal from wrestling, your beret from cadets. All of these pieces and memories stacked up and piled around me, trying to find enough of them to make you tangible and real and here. Desperately trying to find enough of you here to settle my racing heart, my heart that aches for you more with every birthday, every occasion, every milestone, every birth, every death.

There are a million ways for time to stretch me beyond what I thought possible. There are a million ways to frame the loss of you, and my heart and brain do it automatically. A million little anniversaries and realizations made just to try to make sense of how much time is passing and how it somehow feels like two days and ten years since I’ve held you.

It is your 25th birthday, Jake. That means that you would be older than I was when I lost you. Older than when my heart had to begin to learn how to beat separately from you. Older than when I got married. The same age our momma was when you were born. It’s been over three years now, and I’m three years older than you. Each second that ticks by is a record for me for the longest I’ve gone without you here.

It’s hard to imagine what you would think of me as a therapist or of the building and foundation we have created from the love and kindness in your heart. It is never lost on me, when I open that front door, that the lock wouldn’t turn if I hadn’t of lost you. That each person that walks in the door wanting to feel understood, connected, validated and valued is doing so because of you and the path you carved. Each time we connect with someone, each time we get the absolute honour and privilege of sitting with someone in their pain and witnessing their resilience and growth, it is because of you.

To all of those walking around this world with grief in their hearts, I see you. While all of our pain is as unique as the relationships we had to those we lost, I need you to know that your continued pain is valid. There is no timeline for the longing. There is no checklist to adhere to. There is no “normal” way to figure out how to walk around this earth with a heavy heart. If you need someone to sit with in it, if you need some help carrying the load, we can help with that.

This week, I dreamt of you. You were upstairs lying in our nan and pop Hayden’s bed. I walked up those pink carpeted stairs and saw you, sleeping peacefully. I walked closer to you, at the same time realizing that I was dreaming and that I was in space separate from the reality of each day, because you were right in front of me. I lay down next to you, embracing your legs, immediately thinking “memorize this, memorize the way his jeans feel against his legs against his bones”. You looked up at me, and smiled. I started to cry, and you began to reassure me: “I am here, I am okay, You will never forget me”. I held him and cried in that weird dream state, and soon woke up with those same tears on my face. Those dreams always make me so aware of your presence in my life and of all of the things I could never forget about you: the way your eyes lit up when you smiled, the way your arms felt against my back as we hugged, the way your arm hair felt beneath my skin when I “tickled” you, how tight you liked to wear your jeans.

Happy 25th Birthday, Jake. Of all of the things you loved that may or may not be available in the place where we go when we leave this body-bound presence, (fondant scraped off a birthday cake and put in the microwave, salt beef, aunt Rosalie’s blueberry pudding), I know for sure that you have peace today. Our grief is ours, not yours. Your pain is ours, not yours.

With your heart,

Sis