Wow! How time flies and stands still at the same time!! Number Nine is here and I don’t know how. Well, I do, but it still seemed to happen so quickly. This number has been hanging over me all year. I am not sure if that is good or bad, but I did some digging and feel this is a transitioning time. Not sure for who, but I would like to think of it as a heavenly graduation-type moment.
I googled the phrase ‘number nine’ and this comes up: Spiritually, the number 9 represents divine completion, the end of a major life cycle, and a transition into spiritual enlightenment. As the final single digit in math, it signifies wisdom, universal love, and the readiness to release the past to make space for new beginnings. As a lot of biblical or spiritual sayings and phrases go, this can be interpreted to fit the moment and help your mind clarify your thoughts by possibly leaning you towards what you “hope” it means. For me, this can be for Cody being ready to move forward, or maybe it means I will. Time will tell.
My hope for “Number Nine” is that Cody has earned bigger wings and is graduating to the next spiritual level in God’s Kingdom. Does it give him a seat at the right hand? Probably not, but hopefully, an upgraded wing span, more time to watch over his family and loved ones that still miss him so, or maybe the possibility to create more rainbows for his dear, old mother! Who knows.
As many of you know, on or around this time of year, we take our “Watch This, Hold My Beer” vacation and do things we think Cody would enjoy doing. So, we do them for him. This year is no different. I plan on living it up on his behalf this year. Maybe it will be a spiritual moment for me as well.
I look back on the last nine years with so many highs and lows. It took a couple of years before I really knew what happened. It also took losing a few of his friends in similar accidents to push me to do something. Anything! I stood up at his funeral and told a blob full of camouflage it could have been prevented. They heard me, but, like Cody, were invincible to the possibility it could be them. I knew drinking was involved. I just didn’t know how much. Two-plus years after the accident, I reached out to our county and got his police report and toxicology to find out just how much alcohol was involved. That opened up an opportunity and I was asked to speak as a guest for the Victim’s Impact Panel for Illinois Alcohol and Drug Evaluation Services (IADES), in which I gladly accepted that challenge. Six years later, I am still speaking! I don’t want to give it up if it stops at least one of them from putting their parent or loved one in my shoes. It is Cody’s message, not mine. I am only relaying what I know he would want them to know.
That leaves me here. Nine years. Nine birthdays. Nine Christmas’. I truly hope those nine years are a progression of faith, wisdom, and clarity as the spiritual saying says it is. For me, it has been 3,288 days, or 78,912 hours, or 4,734,720 minutes. Nine years of no mud, no trucks, no chewing tobacco and spittoons, and no Cody. Though, in retrospect, still feels like yesterday. I know nine years from now, it will still feel this way. No way around it. I will probably feel really old by then, but it won’t change the this feeling. It is perpetual. I also know that when we meet again, it will be as if no time has passed. Until then, I will continue to cry because he is gone, but smile because he was here.
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