The holidays are my pitfalls. I embrace them knowing that there will be times when I will struggle and be times when I will loathe them, which is horrendous to say. I should live every ounce of being with the boys 24/7. Sadly the holiday period just gives me the time to realise that there is just one special person missing creating havoc with our emotions. Strangely I seem to have more time to reflect which is Lovely but oh so painful as I relive his pain, his treatment, his patience and sadly my occasional impatience, his end, his feelings. I so want to be reliving his joyous moments when Matthias took his first steps, when he said amusing things, which I religiously wrote down, and to remember with ease before cancer took away the ability to remember wonderful memories. I do believe those memories will come back with more ease but I am years away from that. I am so very slowly remembering but in reverse order. At the moment when I have flash memeories I am remembering Thisy with curly hair and in remission. Unfortunately often those memories often take me to the more painful treatment and end. We are just over a year and a half and my memories are at Matthias’ remission stage. There is a huge amount of time to get through before my immediate memories are of a well child, care free, where we didn’t have to talk of chemo and of everything in ‘Hopefully’ terms. I believe as painful as it is, trawling through the copious albums I have will help in the process of remembering. Having said all this there was one day where my remembering was very different. Maybe it is the start of the rest of my remembering? I was swimming through the rises and falls with ease and in control and then the ease turned into a rock hard fall where the pain stabbed more than you can imagine. I was simply going through the name labels for the wonderful job of naming new uniform. I was faced with a batch of labels reading Matthias Barker. Immediately I was thrown to his first day at school. A moment which gives me a relief amongst playing havoc with the pain. Relief that I can actually feel the day when Tony and I took our little boy to school for the first time. New shoes and shining face if not just a little coy worried of his new venture. Brave then and brave until the end. A beautifully painful memory. This has been my first young memory, leaving the memories of chase, chemo and cancer if only for a while. Maybe one day when someone says his name I will picture and remember Thisy as Thisy before cancer took hold of our memories. Slowly year by year we will scrape back the memories so that when he is mentioned we immediately see Matthias as the young, vibrant, cheeky, handsome and totally accepting child we knew and love more and more as the days months and years go by. Our Holiday started with a trip to Liverpool and a wonderful experience joining in Steven Gerrards’ Testimonial day. The match was exhilarating and not a second went past that we didn’t think wouldn’t Thisy have loved it. Sitting with Jos and Xav was wonderful and a huge realisation hung over me that we would potentially never have had the opportunity to be there if it hadn’t have been for our wonderfully brave and inspirational Matthias. It is amazing what he has given us and continues to give us even to this day. Everyday he gives us more, in turn keeping him central to everything we do. Wonderful, but nothing compared to holding him. The evening Gala Dinner was fantastic and a priviledge to be part of. Chris de Burgh was part of the entertainment and as he sang You’ll Never walk Alone our bodies were crushed and all I could do as tears were rolling down my face was pray that Matthias was watching over us and loving it as much as we were and of course pray that he is not alone in his journey. After Liverpool we took the motorway to our annual holiday to what always used to be Wittering. This year we moved along the coast to Selsey and joined the extended family for shared love and laughter with the inevitable pitfalls of grief. Xavier continues to be very expressive and after our family holiday Xav says his prayer which we say every night. On most occasions the prayer never changes except for this night, which read like this. Dear God God bless Mummy Daddy Jonas Jos Xav and God Bless all those that have had a tough life like Thisy. Amen. He is to the point and as ever profound. When he says things like this it makes me think maybe he does understand a fraction of the adult world and of what we feel. Is it just that he is finding it easier to verbalise than the other boys? Only to be hit again by another touching moment. I suggest to the boys that we must visit Matthias’ grave as we need to make sure that it is still beautiful. Xavier turns to me and says “ Mummy Thisy was always beautiful.’ …. just a small beautiful thing to make a small fall. During a quiet time I realise how distant Thi has felt to me. Was that why I have been scared of time moving on and moving away from the last day we held him? Then one day after focusing my mind on being with Thisy I felt quite different, closer and more in touch. I started to look over my photo album - number 10! I was always scoffed at for labelling my albums so rigorously. You may ask why I chose album no.10? The answer is quite simple, it was the only album poking out of line. It made me pull it out and peruse it. In this album Thi was 3, a beautiful little boy where I flash back to my perfect world. Jos had just been born and Thi is adoring him in all pictures. He is sometimes looking like xav. But mostly he is rekindled in the child we have always called Jonas the bonus. How much of a bonus we would never have known until we were without Thi physically, holding us and laughing with us. Whilst Matthias will never and can never be replaced it is evident that he lives in the boys in all they do. In a gesture or a look, in the way they run, the shape of their hands or in the way they say certain things. I pray Matthias will always be seen in his brothers, keeping us as close as we can possibly be, close, yet unable to hold him and smell him in the truest physical sense. An incredible comfort in my boys. Always and Forever x Posted on August 23, 2013