Tomorrow it will be 6 months since Joe died. I want to type “left us” but I honestly think he is still here sometimes, giving me little signs that he is here by my side. I live for those signs because I just miss him so very much.

I have been traveling a lot this summer. I have been gone more than I have been home. Even as I type this, I am not at home, but in Indiana, helping my parents get to see my sister and her family. I have been traveling abroad the last few weeks and will put some photos up in a few weeks when I have them processed and my parents are back home. I will be driving all day tomorrow, on the 6 month anniversary of Joe’s death, so I thought I would write this now, while I have the opportunity.

My life completely shattered when Joe died. Am I better now than I was then? Maybe. I wouldn’t say better…just different. A lot of friends and family have backed away to give us time to grieve and collect ourselves. I am sorry to say that doesn’t help. I am grieving my child…and it is not a process or a step-by-step program that has an ending point of a rainbow and puppies (although I still appreciate and marvel over both). I have learned that this utter devastation…this deep-seeded grief for the loss of my son, will never leave. I will carry it in my heart, on my soul, as long as I breathe. It is not getting easier, but it is getting different. I don’t think you ever get over the loss of a close loved one, but you learn to live with that loss better. I am meeting with a Stephen Minister from a local Methodist church once a week. It is a ministry of listening. She asks me questions and then just listens. There are tears, there is laughter, and in the end, there is prayer. I have missed the last 3 weeks due to travel and I am looking forwards to meeting with her again. I have signed up for a child loss program through a Catholic Church in a town near Omaha called Jesus Wept. I am looking forward to it because I have so many questions….why did God chose to take Joe? Is God punishing me? I was ready to go because of my advanced cancer diagnosis. Why did God take him instead of me? My faith is in a desert right now. I pray and expect nothing. I go to Mass and leave sadder than when I arrived. I thought facing my own mortality was hard…it is nothing compared to this. Please don’t leave a comment about God having a reason that none of us know. I already know that and it doesn’t help to have it repeated over and over again. Just like it didn’t help when I was diagnosed with stage IV cancer and people told me, “God has a reason for this.” That is a hard pill to swallow while you are sick on chemo.

I have spent much of the last 6 months trying my best to comfort Michelle, Joe’s wife, from afar….in the best way I can. We are both deeply hurting, but in different ways. I have lost my son….she has lost the love of her life. I have tried to reach out to his friends through letters or social media, because I know they are hurting too. I try to talk about Joe a lot….to his brother and sister and my husband. The memories may sting a little bit at first, but more often they end in laughter, because Joe did that for me….made me laugh. What a beautiful gift! So I love to talk about him…because memories are all I have now and I don’t want to forget them. When I was first told I was going to die young, I was so afraid that my kids would forget me. I am not sure I ever told anyone that, but that was it. Rich would eventually remarry, life would march on, and I would be forgotten. Pretty selfish, right? Well, I don’t want Joe to be forgotten, so it actually makes me mad when people won’t mention his name. Yes, I may cry. I cry all the time in private. I cry much more in public now and just don’t care. But those tears are cleansing. I guess I wouldn’t say if you aren’t willing to see those tears, say your goodbyes and stay away because it is my life now. I can’t help it. I want to mention that until you lose a child….you can’t understand. I can be distracted for awhile, but it will all come crashing down again.

I don’t say all of this to bring you down, but to let you know where I am coming from. Grief is very lonely. Being deserted by friends and family until they think you might be happy again? Well, makes it even more lonely. If I turn down an invitation to lunch or a Bible Study….I am just not ready. It takes so much work and energy to try and be “normal” out in public. I feel like I am standing still while the world marches on around me. I am often more comfortable in the company of strangers because they don’t know the “old” me….the one that smiled all the time. I now feel it when I smile….as it isn’t as automatic as it was in the past. I try very hard to not make people around me feel uncomfortable….but again, that is a lot of work. Grief is exhausting. With my cancer and the meds I am on, I just have to pick and chose how exhausted I want to become. Sometimes going to a cardio class with strangers at the YMCA is less exhausting than being with friends I know. It is weird…but I am just letting you know how it is.

So Joe. I miss him so very much and I can’t believe it has been 6 months already. Six months ago I would have said that my heart couldn’t take continuing to live for 6 months…yet here I am….still putting one foot in front of the other. There are a lot of other “firsts” coming up pretty soon that will be hard to go through. But I can’t borrow worry for another day. This one is big enough. So I end with some favorite photos of my Joe…

This week Lily starts her senior year. I am going to miss the first week and a half because I will be out of town, but her grandparents are by her side as she enters her last year of high school. I took a photo of her this morning before she went to her orientation at school. School starts Wednesday. She had a wild hair yesterday and cut off a good majority of her hair, which she will be donating as she did last time. This girl has had a really tough high school career. Freshman year, I am diagnosed with stage IV cancer and got very sick from my initial treatments. Then there was that whole COVID thing. Our relationship barely survived home school time. Ugh. Then, of course, her biggest brother dies in a car accident. Let us all pray for a quiet, boring year with nothing but good surprises in store for her.

On a side note, Michelle gave us Joe’s senior ring to give to Lily this week. It was funny because it was such a blend of Rich’s and my class rings. I am so sad that he won’t be here to cheer her on during her senior year. However, I know he is always by her side, watching out for her.

A few days after we got back from our trip out west, Rich and I drove down to Kansas City to take Michelle out to a baseball game. The Red Sox were playing and we have gone down there before with the Royals are hosting Boston. It is easier than flying back to Boston for a game…although Fenway….so worth it! We met Michelle at her house and took her out to dinner before heading to the stadium. Although Michelle is not a big baseball fan, she managed to don a Royals shirt and happily accompanied us when we bribed her with chocolate dippin dots. I was very blessed to have a friend from Leesville High School, where we both graduated together decades ago, join us. It was so great to catch up with Leif and to introduce him to Rich and Michelle. The Red Sox did not win. The Boston manager got kicked out of the game for mouthing off to the ump. Ah well. It was so great to be able to spend some time with Michelle and catch up on everything. I can’t begin to tell you all how proud I am of all the hard work she has done. Grief sucks. We lost our son and she lost the love of her life. Thankfully, we still have each other and can lean on each other when need be. Only regret? We should have had her wear the extra Red Sox jersey we brought!

We got off our ship pretty early and had the entire day to travel around Seattle. We once again found a Bounce to drop off our luggage, and then went on the Hop On, Hop Off bus around the city. We had been in Seattle only about 3 years ago, and so we knew what we wanted to see again and what we could politely pass by. It was a beautiful sunny day and we had a great last full day of vacation in the Pacific Northwest.

Note…the gum wall. It is like a trainwreck…it is awful and you want to look away, but you can’t help but stare in fascination. I have MANY gumwall photos of all three of our kids over the years. And…we always stop at Pike’s Market Place and eat hot sugared donuts in brown paper bags, watch the fishermen try and sell the fish, admire the amazing flowers, and take photos by the brass pig. It is what the Messinas do when in Seattle.

I don’t know if the cruise lines were unhappy with Canada for closing its ports to cruise ships for 2+ years or what, but Canada got the short end of the stick during this cruise…and by most of the cruiselines coming through this port. We were required to make a stop in Canada…so we did – for 3 hours from 8:30 to 11:30 p.m. Everything was already closed and we saw most of the city in the dark. We walked A LOT on this stop…going through some gardens along the coast and then heading inland towards the Chinatown…which was, of course, all closed. We were paired up on the ship with another family for all our dinner meals. They were also retired military and had a teen daughter adopted from China. Lily and Sophia pal’d around on the ship in the evening after dinner a few nights. We ran into them at the entrance to Chinatown and took pictures of the girls together. Sophia is younger, but is much bigger than our Lily. Sorry Canada, we tried to be friendly, but nothing was open!

This stop was fascinating! I loved this town and really wished that I would be able to have more time there. This is the salmon capital of Alaska. We saw a lot of bald eagles and got to spend some time walking around Creek Street, where the infamous Dolly and her brothel, were frequented by the men during the Gold Rush. There are a lot of totem poles here as well. I just really had a nice time there and wanted more time to explore.

On this day we had an excursion but we did not ever put our feet on land. We met a bunch our group of fellow adventurers at 6:30 a.m. to wait for our smaller boats to arrive and board them. When I woke up I looked at the temperature….knowing I would have to dress warmer being closer to the water and close to glaciers. The ambient temperature was 32 degrees. Layers! It was also windy and raining. Even better! I didn’t have to jockey for positions along the railing to take photos outside the main cabin.

For a few hours we tootled around, traveling to different glaciers in the area and marveling at the bright blue frozen ice everywhere in the mist. We saw a lot of seals and a few bald eagles. Lily couldn’t manage to find a sweatshirt she would like to have because she wanted a plain one…one that didn’t say ALASKA all over it. She did, however, find a hat that she loved to wear. The pictures of Rich sleeping was on our cabin balcony. We were cruising through this beautiful fjord and it was so peaceful. Rich was being my “spotter” in case we saw some wild animals or birds. However, between our early start that morning and the glaciertini (yep a martini made with glacial ice) that was pretty strong on the excursion, he didn’t last long. Considering we didn’t have winter coats, just rain coats layered over our other layers, we stayed relatively warm except for our fingers.

Skagway is a little Alaskan town that looks like it stepped out of the wild west. We had one of our longest stops in this little town, and some of the worst weather. It got pretty rainy and windy throughout the day. However, all this worked in our benefit, because our nephew, Dante, was working there as a seasonal worker in the town. His mom, Tammie, Rich’s sister, was there visiting him as well. So we had a little Messina reunion in Skagway. We went on a hike with Dante leading us along, and then on a long train ride up through the mountains. This town was booming during the Klondike Gold Rush and we followed the train through the White Pass and the Yukon Rout Railroad track along the steep Chilkoot trail. It goes all the way up to the Canadian border. Lily can sleep anywhere…and fell asleep on the train. The second photo of her is the look we get every morning. She is not a morning person. We then walked around the town and had a nice dinner before heading back to the ship.

On our stop in Juneau, we went on a tour to see the Mildenhall Glacier and to go on a whale watching tour. I am married to a New Englander but have never seen whales in the wild. We were not disappointed. We had a lot of changes to see whales in the area. We also saw lots of eagles watching us along the way. There was a medical emergency on our ship about an hour after leaving Juneau, so we turned around and went back. That allowed us to see the port at night, which was pretty.

We hopped on our Carnival cruise ship in Seattle and were at sea the first day. It was pretty rocky. You know it is rocky if the crew keeps commenting on it. Rich and Lily didn’t feel so great, but decided to sleep it off during a daytime nap. Our first stop was called the Icy Straits, which is actually near the small native Alaskan town called Hoonah. There we went on an excursion to try and see bears in the wild. There were eight of us in a van being driven by a substitute driver…who happened to be the Eagle clan leader in Hoonah. Jack was very knowledgeable and chatted about how things worked within the Native Americans in Alaska. The tour was supposed to last 3 hours but he felt really bad we hadn’t seen anything during our long drive on trucking roads in a national forest that he kept driving. It paid off when we saw a momma bear and her cub walking along the water’s edge. We were very excited to see them. We had a very tight squeeze getting back to the ship. There may have been some running involved. We mentioned to Jack several times that if the ship left without us, we were going to be staying with him. I am not sure how serious he took us. Anyhow, enjoy the photos…