I’ve recently learned of different types of math going around, which are basically the internal calculations we do to justify a behavior or way of thinking, like doing Girl Math to spend enough to get free shipping (because you’re already going to spend that money, might as well get something for it, amiright?) or doing ADHD Math where you have to be somewhere at 2 so you need to leave by 1:30, which means you need to start getting kids out the door at 1:15, which means you need to make sure everyone’s had lunch, is dressed, and can find their shoes by 1, which means…. and all of a sudden you wake up at 6am feeling like you’re already late- and you probably still will be. (This has been a main Factory Setting of mine my entire life.)

Now the holidays and the end of the year are coming, and my brain kind of feels like a balloon, floating on a string above my body. Holidays are hard in and of themselves with so much planning (yay, more internal calculations!) and activities to manage, and they can be even harder after loss, when the planning and activities should be there, and aren’t.

I lost both of my beloved grandparents on my dad’s side this last year, and I haven’t quite wrapped my mind around it yet. My Grammy was my greatest mentor, and my Boppa was a gentle, wise soul- and all I got to see of what it would have looked like to see my dad age, since he died at 54 in 2010. That’s only 11 years older than I am now, and that was 13 years ago… and that’s an example of what I call Grief Math.

The holidays are particularly hard for me as a loss parent, especially since Patrick’s birthday is December 4th, right after Thanksgiving, He should be twelve. Twelve. I didn’t even get to see him turn two. I did get him for 14 months and 4 days, and somewhere around 2 hours… I don’t know when specifically he died, only that I put him to bed, went in myself 2 hours later, and he was gone- and that’s how I learned about SUDC, Sudden Unexplained Death in Childhood. You can read more about it here, and about that night here.

I counted Fridays into the hundreds. I couldn’t help it, I just did. I was like a timeline change where everything went from BC: Baby Central, to AD: After Death. Everything happened either before or after that night, and every time I see a photo of his sweet face, I reflexively do the math to know how long he had to live from then. His first birthday photos, he has two months and three days left. The last photo I took for no reason of him nursing in the Target parking lot, he had around 28 hours.

And then, there’s the math of how old he would be. I feel a pang of guilt each time I have to do it, and anxious I’m going to get it wrong. How could a parent not immediately know the age of their child? It’s hard when there aren’t birthdays to remember, and years of memories to fill the time. There’s just a hollow ache with deep pangs of longing dappled by memories of when he was here, and they grow fuzzier all the time. Un/fortunately, trauma surrounds painful memories in a bubble so they’re not so sharp- annnnd we’re back to my current balloon-head state.

This will be the second set of holidays without my Grammy, the first without my Boppa or going to their house, and 14 since I’ve handed my dad a screwdriver to put batteries in some Christmas toy. We didn’t know he was sick then- it was one month from him getting a stage 4 Melanoma diagnosis, and nine months until he passed. More Grief Math… The holidays are riddled with it by nature for me.

I’m lucky to still have and live near my maternal grandmother and step-grandfather whom she married when I was 6. She just turned 90 this summer, and still takes a walk around the block after dinner, goes to church every Sunday, and volunteers at the food bank now and again.,, but still, I know these holidays are going to be some of the last in the memory bank with her around, even if it’s for another decade or more, and I hope it is. My mom, stepdad, and sisters all live close and will get together in our cute outfits (with elastic waistbands or none at all, we’re not masochists) to walk around the kitchen eating cheese in while the cousins help wrangle the little ones and it’s going to be great… but I’ll know Patrick is missing. My dad is missing. I’ll miss my grandparents deeply.

I always feel it and it always hurts, but I welcome it now instead of trying to to rationalize it or push it away. The measure of my grief is the same as my love, trapped like a panicked, broken-winged bird in a cage, when before, it had the whole sky. It hurts because it matters, because he matters, and always will. I get to be the one who knew him, the one to write his memory into being, even here and now.

I think maybe part of my doing Grief Math is to apply some kind of parameter that makes some damn sense around something that just doesn’t feel right and never will. He should be here. So many children and loved ones should fucking be here and aren’t, so my brain tries to apply what logic it can around that fact like the cage around that poor bird. And like a child or a pet, we have to care for grief, give it air and sunlight, feed it memories, give it a safe place to be wild sometimes.

Right now for me, that time is here, early Wednesday morning before the littles wake, one day before the memories we’ll make tomorrow. I’ll take that kind of math, too.