Normal is that extra chocolate Easter bunny sitting on the counter because you always get your children a choclate bunny, and this year you still bought one for the one who is not here.

Normal is sitting at the computer crying, sharing how you feel with chat buddies who have also lost a child.

Normal is feeling like you know how to act and are more comfortable with a funeral and being at the cemetery were my son is buried, than a wedding or a birthday party. Yet, feeling a stab of pain in your heart when you smell the flowers, see that casket, and all the crying people.

Normal is feeling like you can't sit another minute without getting up and screaming cause you just don't like to sit through church anymore. And yet feeling like you have more faith and belief in God than you ever have had before.

Normal is going to bed feeling like your kids who are alive got cheated out of happy cheerful parents and instead they are stuck with sober, cautious people.

Normal is having tears waiting behind every smile when you realize someone important is missing from all the important events in your families' life.

Normal is not sleeping very well because a thousand 'what if's' and 'why didn't I's' go through your head constantly.

Normal is having the TV on the minute I wake up and the last thing on before I go to sleep at night,the need for noise because the silence is deafening.

Normal is every happy event in my life always being backed up with sadness lurking close behind because of the hole in my heart.

Normal is seeing Lisa, Dee, and Ray at the cemetery visiting their brothers grave, or my grandchildren visiting their dad's grave, and thinking, how could this be normal?

They shouldn't have to be going through this.

Normal is telling the story of Bobby's death as if it were an everyday common place activity and then gasping in horror at how awful it sounds.

And yet realizing it has become part of our normal.

Normal is each year coming up with the difficult task of how to honor your child's memory and their birthday and survive those days. And trying to find the balloon or flag that fits the occasion.

Happy Birthday? Not really.

Normal is my heart warming and yet sinking at the sight of that ugly plant in the front flower bed and thinking how Bobby liked it and how much I didn't.

Normal is listening for the phone to ring asking if I can go take him to a doctors appointment.

Normal is disliking jokes about death, funerals. Bodies being referred to as cadavers when you know they were once someone's loved one.

Normal is being impatient with everything, but someone stricken with grief over the loss of their child.

Normal is feeling a common bond with friends in England, Australia, Netherlands, Canada, and all over the USA, but yet never having met any of them face to face.

Normal is a new friendship with another grieving mother and meeting for coffee and talkingand crying together over our children and our new lives.And worrying together over our living children.

Normal is being too tired to care if you paid the bills, cleaned house or did laundry or if there is any food in the house.

Normal is wondering this time whether you are going to say you have 3 or 4 children because you will never see this person again and it is not worth explaining that one of them is in heaven. And yet when you say only 3 to avoid that problem you feel horrible as if you have betrayed that child.

And last of all normal is hiding all the things that have become normal for you to feel, so that everyone around you will think that you are "normal".

My Bobby has been gone since May 2, 2001.

These things are what is 'normal' for me now.