It's already starting.
It's July. On 06Jul1980, my beautiful daughter was born. On 19Jul2001, she was killed. This is the year when I will have been without her as long as I had her, and it's turning me into a blubbering pile of goo.
I had counseling today and cried and cried. My counselor told me about a memorial garden in Raleigh and I arranged for a brick to be placed in her name. Cried and cried to the advocate I spoke to. She was great.
July has never been a good month for me mentally and psychologically since Bekah died. It consumes too much of my thoughts and overtakes my feelings. I guess I would say it's just the murder month and it always will be. No matter how strongly I believe that Bekah is with me and that I will see her when I die. No matter how much time has passed since the crime.
We go back to the beginning of the grief, and I must do now what I worked so, so hard to do then: lean into it. Here's a poem I wrote then, it's maybe my favorite of all the many poems I wrote then.
today’s paean to why
There's like a why ocean,
from which waves of why
either tease or soak
my grief-addled mind.
During why's high tide,
nearly drowned in why,
The world abounds with why
All I hear is the sound of why
If it tells me it will have to kill me
When why recedes it is still a mystery
Still cannot know it
while I must respect its immense power over me
Riptides of why swamp me regularly
when I'm rolled crazily around in why,
Powerless to dive away from why
Useless to try dominating why.
On the island why I stop to see
How perseverance can still abide in me
On the mainland why I walk the beach
Hope defying why, the why of life
Is easy to see
By my side or inside of me,
Your spirit your love accompanies
With the energy of a wave
that embodies a natural eternity.
https://www.lapdonline.org/newsroom/hit-and-run-suspect-captured/
= new reply since forum marked as read
As July approaches, it's on my mind more and more...this year, even more so, because I cannot get past the fact that I will have been without her as long as I had her. When she died, no I never thought then that I would even be around for that day, but it's looking like I will barring an unforeseen catastrophe.
I'm sorry for your loss 
Have you made a shrine to her to honor her life? This could help.
We are here for you.
I, too, have suffered the loss of an adult child. It hurts. Terribly.
But knowing others care & are willing to talk in difficult times takes the edge off a bit.
I'm glad you are able to talk about what you are feeling & I love your shrine!
there are so many of us, but for most, we are the only ones among our closest family and friends. I am so thankful for the grief counseling with homicide survivors and for DU too.
Thank goodness for DU & therapists! 
And very glad you are writing about it - writing always helps me, too
Writing has saved me. Along with counseling and the tincture of time.
doin' my best!
love your screen name by the way (i imagine your parents calling you that when you were little)
as long as she was here.
In 2017 my 30 year old son took his life. He'd been dealing with depression, well hidden from his parents and most of his friends, so it came as a huge shock. But I may not live long enough to have him gone as long as he was here.
And I think how you lost your daughter was vastly worse than how I lost my son. I love you.
I am so sorry. I don't think it's worse for me than for you. Back in the beginning I would think of all the ways it could be better, could be worse, for instance, it would be better if she got sick and we got to say good-bye. It would be worse if her killer was never caught. and so on. But in the world of bereavement, these distinctions mean nothing. It is not valid to quantify anybody's grief or level of pain. There is simply nothing worse in life than losing a child. That's what I think. It turns nature on its head.
It happens a lot, when it feels as if it should never happen at all.
Love to you.
You are so right.
But this is what I say: As sorry as I am that my son took his own life, I actually have a lot to be grateful for. One is that he didn't do anything messy, like with a gun. Nor did he jump off a bridge (a distinct possibility as he lived in Portland, OR) so we'd never know what happened. He took something, that he'd apparently gotten over the internet, and was found the next morning by his roommate. So he also didn't languish in his apartment until neighbors complained of the smell.
I think it would be vastly harder to lose a child to some kind of accident (car, boating, whatever) or to some disease, or worse yet (in my opinion) to being killed by someone. Especially in a school shooting.
He chose to leave this life. I wish he hadn't. The night before he took his life, he called me and we talked for well over an hour, discussing things we'd never talked about before. I realized much later that he'd called me to say goodbye, without actually saying that. Our last words to each other were "I love you" and that means a lot to me.
And here's what I think of as the best part. He left behind a note (although it was dated some four months earlier, which raises the question of, What was that about? In the middle of it, he made me laugh out loud. What a gift from him, right?
And love back to you.