Life seems to have settled down a bit, except for the vacationing part. We are going to Washington state in a few days to visit family, and there won't be time to get to Fort Lewis to look at the memorial which makes me a little sad. I am trying to get over the feeling that we have to mark absolutely every occasion having to do with Thomas. This year I did not get to Mass on his birthday for instance and felt a bit guilty about that. But life and the living intervene a lot, and I suppose it's in the natural course of events that our lives sort of close over the hole left by this loss. It's not a seamless closure of course. Though I missed Mass, we did buy a cake for the day, a lovely chocolate cake with frosting balloons on the top. I did not have anything written on the cake. We remembered the birthday when he did not get the first piece and then spent (as his other sister said on her Facebook page) "the next decade bitching about it" though it was not quite a decade as he was 13 the year that happened and he died at 20. We did not sing happy birthday (which really would have been morbid) but we did spend some time talking about Thomas and enjoying the cake in his memory.