Stories for Saab: Three Years, and It Still Hasn't Changed

 Dearest Saab,

How did I ever get to three years without you? I still don't have an answer for that. I just know that I did, somehow, one ordinary day after another, until they added up to this.

Something shifted for me this year, and I want to tell you about it honestly, even if it's not the easiest thing to say. I'm not in the same place I was at year one, or even at year two. The sharp, jagged edge of it has worn down some. I can talk about you now without my voice breaking every single time. I can look at your photos and smile before I cry, instead of the other way around. I used to think that would feel like healing. Instead it feels a little like guilt - like softening is its own kind of forgetting, even though I know, logically, that it isn't.

I've stopped trying to explain August to people who weren't there for it. They mean well when they say "it gets easier," and in a strange, technical sense, they're not wrong. But easier isn't the same as okay, and I don't think I'll ever call this okay. I've just gotten more practiced at carrying it in front of other people without it showing on my face.

What hasn't changed, not even a little, is how much I still miss the smallest things about you. Not the big milestones or the "what could have beens"—those come and go. It's the small stuff that gets me. The particular way you'd call me mommy. The weight of you wanting to do higa on mommy. The sounds of you singing your heart out. The way you'd look proud when someone calls you beautiful.

Three years, and my body still remembers all of it like it happened this morning.

And still, every single August, I brace myself the same way I always have. I know it's coming. I know the exact date it's aimed at. And still, every year, it finds a way to knock the wind out of me anyway.

Your baby sister is bigger now than she was last year, and every day she becomes a little more of her own person—curious, and full of a joy that reminds me, in flashes, of you. She knows you and looks at your photos always. She says hi to you every morning, through the little space we have for you in our bedroom. She will grow up knowing your name. She will grow up knowing she has a big sister who loved fiercely and fought bravely, and who is loved still.

Your daddy and I have found our own quiet way of holding this together. Not because the grief has gotten smaller, but because we've gotten better, somehow, at holding it side by side instead of alone. Some Augusts are harder on him than on me, and some are the reverse, and we've learned to notice which one it is and show up for each other accordingly.

But there's a guilt I don't think I've said out loud until now. Every day, I have to choose to be here—fully here, not just physically but present—with your daddy and with Trixie. And every time I make that choice, some part of me whispers that it's unfair to you. That showing up for them, laughing with them, building a life around the shape you left behind, means I'm leaving you further behind too. And then the opposite happens—I let myself sit too long in missing you, and I feel like I'm stealing something from Trixie, from the childhood she deserves with a mother who isn't half somewhere else. There's no version of this where I get it right for everyone. Whatever I choose, in some quiet corner of my heart, feels like a small betrayal of someone I love. I don't know how to solve that. I'm not sure it's meant to be solved. I think I just have to keep choosing anyway, and trust that you, of all people, would understand why.

So three years later, I'm still here. Still getting up. Still choosing, every single day, to keep going—not because it's easy, but because you, and your sister, and your daddy, and the love we built together, are worth every hard thing this life asks of me.

August will always break my heart a little. I don't think that will ever change, and I've made my peace with that. But it will also always be the month that reminds me what the fiercest kind of love looks like—the kind that doesn't end just because a body does.

We miss you every single day, anak. Three years hasn't changed that, and I don't expect three hundred would either.

Please keep waiting for me. Every day that passes leads me closer to you.

Soon anak, soon.