Is there sunshine where you are, the way there was when you were here?

Silence is deafening.

In silence you can hear your own heart beat. Because of that, even in one of those float chambers, you are never totally in silence.

I laid there on the ground of the playroom, wanting to be near someone. I had each of my children twenty feet away from me in different rooms, as well as two of the best friends a girl could ask for, but everyone was sleeping. I was alone.

My eyes filled up with tears as I began to process the idea that I would never see Joe again. I would never hear his voice, I would never have a hug. I would never laugh as he made fun of Rob, or talk about life with him again. I'd never see him stare at my kids with love and adoration. 

Nope, I thought, I can't be alone. I wrapped myself in a blanket and puttered outside to where Rob and Pat were sitting around the propane fire.

"Can I join you? Being alone was a bad idea."

Exhaustion took over. We laughed, made inappropriate jokes, and I personally didn't stop talking because the quiet would make me think. I would see their faces change, reflecting the same thing - that the quiet caused us all to absorb. The sun started to rise, and I found myself not being able to remember the last time I was awake and outside to watch the sunrise like this. Still, the silence in between the nervous laughter, the jokes, it was too much. The tears would start, and I'd wipe them away.

Pat excused himself, ready to try to get some sleep. No sooner than he made it in to the house did his girlfriend, Anna, call him from Germany. She'd just woken up, and we hadn't even slept. Rob and I sat in the patio chairs and watched as Pat walked up and down our long driveway, giving Anna some of the hardest news she would have to receive being halfway across the world. 

We sat in the quiet of the morning, as the birds woke up around us. A song that Mike Shinoda wrote in the wake of the Chester Bennington's started to play in my head. 

There's an emptiness tonight, a hole that wasn't there before.

And I keep reaching for the light, but I can't find it anymore.

There's an emptiness tonight, a heavy hand that pulls me down,

They say it's gonna be alright, but can't begin to tell me how.

It became abundantly clear in that moment that I was likely only going to listen to this album written by this man, a stranger, who lost his best friend to the very same thing that I just had. I took a deep breath and exhaled with a sob. How was I going to do this? How was I going to support my husband, my son, Pat...Nadine? How do you begin to pick up the pieces of your heart when you don't even know where they've landed post-nuclear explosion, let alone begin to comprehend how to help others pick up their pieces? 

From there, my thoughts went to the LAV in front of the armoury, and the scene it must have been. There was a major police presence, that I knew. I didn't want to ask Pat about what he'd seen. I didn't know that I wanted to know. Because of this, my mind kept fluttering back to his last moments. Was he crying? Did he close his eyes and feel peace before his darkness? Was he hoping for someone to come and just say the right words? Was he scared? Rob's voice quietly cut through my thoughts.

"We should get some sleep, even if it's just a few hours."

Tomorrow brought a whole new level of challenges. Phone calls needed to be made and social media releases needed to be written. Rob and I were faced with the idea of having to be an adult and parent our children when all we wanted to do was hide away. He was right, though. We needed to sleep.

Exhausted, I followed Rob upstairs but the concept of sleep seemed incredibly foreign to me. Sleep somehow has always been a reset button, like no matter what happened in the day leading up to you climbing in to bed doesn't matter because tomorrow you're going to wake up, and you can start again. Except the sun was up and tomorrow had already begun. No matter how deep we dug our heels in to the ground at 7PM on July 13th, 2018, time would move forward and the next hour would take him away from us. No reset button, no starting again. No amount of sleep was ever going to wash away the fact that our family would never be whole again, and that our lives would now be classified in to two parts....before and after.

Before Joe. After Joe. As we approach our "final first", the first anniversary of his death, he has been on our minds heavily. Many good stories have come from it, with laughter which sometimes leads to tears. Sometimes leads to a silence so thick that you almost choke on it, because those that were part of the conversation are stuck in their own thoughts, own memories about him. Then someone sighs, calls him an asshole, and we laugh. I look at pictures of all of us and see how we have aged this past year. How sad our eyes are now versus how bright they were before. Now, there is an emptiness in all of them because he took with him who we all used to be.

Curious about the song? Give it a listen below - Looking For An Answer by Mike Shinoda
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=labrkIEGxyA&list=RDlabrkIEGxyA&index=1