{"id":987,"date":"2007-02-09T07:27:00","date_gmt":"2007-02-09T11:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/2007\/02\/09\/thursday-night-my-birthday-eve\/"},"modified":"2007-02-09T07:27:00","modified_gmt":"2007-02-09T11:27:00","slug":"thursday-night-my-birthday-eve","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/2007\/02\/09\/thursday-night-my-birthday-eve\/","title":{"rendered":"Thursday Night &#8211; my birthday eve"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"pBlogBody_227822068\" class=\"blogContent\">\n<p>\t\t\t\t\t\t    The four of us just came back from Sakuras where we had an excellent sushi dinner in early celebration of my 48<sup>th<\/sup> birthday tomorrow. <span style=\"\">&nbsp;<\/span>We ordered a 5<sup>th<\/sup> bowl of miso soup for Sam.. He&#8217;s always at the table when the four of s sit down.<span style=\"\">&nbsp;&nbsp; <\/span>It&#8217;s funny facing my birthday. Right now, I feel pretty good about it.. though I&#8217;m not sure how I&#8217;ll feel tomorrow. This birthday.. and any holiday\/anniversary is going to feel different without Sam physically here with us. <span style=\"\">&nbsp;<\/span>It&#8217;s a change that&#8217;s to big to explain. The hopes and dreams I had for my first 47 years have been completely and irrevocably changed by Sam&#8217;s death. I don&#8217;t mean that I don&#8217;t still have hopes and dreams.. It&#8217;s that I need to rebuild them all. I&#8217;m certainly sadder than I was.. but I think I&#8217;m stronger somehow too. It&#8217;s so hard integrating that I won&#8217;t get to experience some of the things I had hoped to cherish in the future.. Sam driving, Sam&#8217;s Graduation, Sam&#8217;s wedding, Sam&#8217;s kids.. and that feels like a huge hole in my heart. <span style=\"\">&nbsp;<\/span>At the same time I know that I&#8217;m still blessed. That thought came to me so strongly at the Reiki session I did today with Marci T. I know that I&#8217;m going to live the years to come in a more mindful and thoughtful place.. Even as I grieve for Sam, I&#8217;m so thankful for what I have.. my beautiful sons Max and Gabe who are here <span style=\"\">&nbsp;<\/span>with us and the memory and presence of my beautiful son <span style=\"\">&nbsp;<\/span>Sam who feels like he&#8217;s everywhere I&#8217;m so lucky to have my strong and beautiful wife Diane by my side.. our loving parents and siblings. This amazing community\u2026. <span style=\"\">&nbsp;<\/span><span style=\"\">&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/span>Our lives are not perfect anymore<span style=\"\">&nbsp; <\/span>but we have much still to be thankful for. <span style=\"\">&nbsp;<\/span>.. and I know it.. and that&#8217;s how I plan to face my birthday tomorrow.. Wish me luck.&nbsp;   <\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><span style=\"\">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <\/span>Diane and I began today talking about the stages of grief table that I posted in the blog yesterday She made a good point about the first column of the table that suggests a timeline for the process. She pointed out how strange it is to try to assign a specific timeline for a process that everyone has to approach differently. It really is dangerous to set an expectation on someone.. or on yourself for that matter.. that after 2weeks we&#8217;ll be like this.. after 3 months I&#8217;m going to be like that\u2026 after 6 months <span style=\"\">&nbsp;<\/span>I&#8217;ll be fine. <span style=\"\">&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/span>I&#8217;m really dreading the day that someone says or implies <span style=\"\">&nbsp;<\/span>&#8220;<i>aren&#8217;t you over this yet ?!&#8221; <\/i><span style=\"\">&nbsp;<\/span>It&#8217;s not going to happen like that\u2026. <i>Over it<\/i> isn&#8217;t even my goal. <\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><span style=\"\">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <\/span>Speaking of time, I noticed that <span style=\"\">&nbsp;<\/span>today marks 80 days since Sam died\u2026 I was thinking today as I ran that that makes 80 days in a row I&#8217;ve spent at least a few minutes crying hard\u2026That&#8217;s 80 days in a row that I&#8217;ve gone to bed thinking about Sam.. and that I&#8217;ve woke up thinking about him. <span style=\"\">&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/span>That&#8217;s an amazing amount of time to think of one thing\u2026 and I&#8217;m just starting at this. <\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><span style=\"\">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <\/span>OK.. <span style=\"\">&nbsp;<\/span>I&#8217;m going to go write Sam&#8217;s name in the snow.. I&#8217;ve done it every day there&#8217;s been snow on the ground. I hope some other folks will do the same. .. consider that a birthday present for me. Hey Sam.. you&#8217;re invited to my party.. always.<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">-jc<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><o:p>&nbsp;<\/o:p>ps Mike Lawlor was kind enough to forward me a recording of the Skanky Green song that the guys just wrote about Sam. I posted the lyrics last Sunday (<st1:date year=\"2007\" day=\"4\" month=\"2\">2\/04\/07<\/st1:date>)..Here&#8217;s the recording of&nbsp; <a href=\"http:\/\/samstones.org\/captsam.mp3\" target=\"_self\">The Ballad of Captain Sam<\/a>. I love it !<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The four of us just came back from Sakuras where we had an excellent sushi dinner in early celebration of my 48th birthday tomorrow. &nbsp;We ordered a 5th bowl of miso soup for Sam.. He&#8217;s always at the table when the four of s sit down.&nbsp;&nbsp; It&#8217;s funny facing my birthday. Right now, I feel &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/2007\/02\/09\/thursday-night-my-birthday-eve\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Thursday Night &#8211; my birthday eve<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-987","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=987"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/987\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}