It’s been 4 weeks today since I lost my beautiful Brendan Bjorn. I don’t know where the time has gone. The weeks have been lost in the fog that I find myself walking through most days.

Yesterday, they (HSE equipment stores) came to take away my son’s special medical bed, his custom wheelchair, and all his unused supplies. The pick up of the items had been postponed from last week. Maybe that’s the way it was meant to be, because as it turns out, I needed more time seeing those memories in a tangible way.

I had requested they come collect the items because I remember all too well the months on end Brendan Bjorn waited for each piece of special equipment. The man who came to collect the items had been here before to move Brendan Bjorn’s bed while home modifications were about to begin, and then he returned when they were completed. I was glad to see it was him drive up in the truck yesterday to collect those items I had just spent over an hour sobbing on.

I held the headrest of the wheelchair as I cried, visualising my precious boy sitting in it as he did countless times, laughing, eyes beaming with love, as he enjoyed being taken for a stroll amongst the trees.

I laid my head on his bed, right where he had last lay his head, and I sobbed. Uncontrollably so. That wave of grief took hold to the point I could barely breathe, coughing with my asthma triggered.

As the bed was being dismantled, the man from the HSE walked back into Brendan Bjorn’s room and found me staring at what remained of it. He came up to me and, looking me in the eye, and said, “They are just tools he used. They aren’t him, his spirit.” Then he told me a story about an old stubborn farmer who didn’t want to accept that he needed a medical bed. He refused it, the wife told him at the door. So, this wonderful HSE man had a chat with him, similar to what he had with me yesterday, explaining that the bed is just a tool to use, it isn’t the person.

And it made all the difference.
I’m so thankful it was he who came to collect those items.

Brendan Bjorn’s room is achingly empty now. I know at some point I will need to go through everything else. His clothes, the remaining medical supplies on his bedside table, the DVDs he so loved to watch. But now is not the time for that. I’m not ready. Yesterday was physically and emotionally taxing on me with all the heavy crying and I find myself in pain this morning.

This is another day on the path of grieving. The waves will come, and they will go. They come out of nowhere, and sometimes they leave just as quickly.

What will never leave is my indescribable love for my first born son, my Brendan Bjorn. My angel.