Seven

"I miss him so much! I can't wait until he's home!", she said. Her boy was away for a few days and, like all mothers, she missed her child desperately. She was excited knowing that she was soon going to have him back home, safe in her arms.

"I'm miss him so much."

Multiply that by forever, I thought.

I have absolutely no idea how anyone survives the loss of a child. Every day I do it, and after all this time I still don't really know how.

Thomas would be seven today. He is gone. And I still breathe and the world still turns - and I just don't know how any of it is possible.

But somehow it is.

And so once again, I'm sending all my love and big birthday kisses heavenward to the sweetest and most beautiful boy I've ever seen.

oxox

Five years

Close your eyes,
Have no fear,
The monsters gone,
He's on the run and your daddy's here,

Beautiful,
Beautiful, beautiful,
Beautiful Boy,

Before you go to sleep,
Say a little prayer,
Every day in every way,
It's getting better and better,

Beautiful,
Beautiful, beautiful,
Beautiful Boy,

Out on the ocean sailing away,
I can hardly wait,
To see you to come of age,
But I guess we'll both,
Just have to be patient,
Yes it's a long way to go,
But in the meantime,

Before you cross the street,
Take my hand,
Life is just what happens to you,
While your busy making other plans,

Beautiful,
Beautiful, beautiful,
Beautiful Boy,

~ John Lennon

With all the love my heart can hold, birthday kisses and hugs to heaven, my sweet, sweet little boy. I miss you and I'll love you forever and a day.

Love, Mommy

Birthday kisses to heaven

I love you more and more every single day. I can't imagine how there will be enough of me to hold all that love eventually, it'll be so big.

I miss you. Happy 4th birthday, sweet one.

The rules of cake

Last night I got to thinking about the way people recognize the birthdays of the children they have lost.

I do it. Most of us do, in some way.

For me, it begins with cake. Every year on Thomas' birthday I make a small cake for My Beloved and I to share, complete with candles which we both blow out together.

We take the day off, do a special annual good deed in remembrance of our boy, have lunch together then come home for cake. There's a great deal of comfort in the repetition of this now annual rite; In wrapping ourselves in the warmth of shared love and collective sorrow as we take the same familiar steps every March 9th.

Some people release balloons, some make donations, some light candles, others take flowers to the place their child is buried or to the spot where their son or daughter's ashes caught the wind and swirled up to the heavens.

But more interesting than what we do, is the fact that we do something at all. I don't celebrate the birthdays of any other dead people. Well, except maybe Jesus - but his is kind of hard to avoid. And somewhat mandated if you're Christian.

I think about my Grandmother on her birthday, but I don't stop to ruminate on how old she'd be, what she'd be doing, what present I'd get her, how excited she'd be - or any of the other things I think about when Thomas' birthday rolls around.

Dead baby birthdays are a whole different animal.

Sometimes I worry that I'm walking the fine line between remembrance and morbidness (a fact that is in itself a hard thing to reconcile - that anything about your child should be even remotely morbid). Is it "off" to make a cake for a dead child? Is it strange to make a point of doing something to mark the day?

Maybe it is. But maybe only to people who've never had to.

The rules are different for the rest of us.

And until the world at large learns to feel more comfortable dealing with and acknowledging our sorrow, we'll have no choice but to continue making the rules up as we go along, teaching them to those who will never have to use them, and gently passing them on to those who will.

*****


Naomi - I'm so sorry. In three and a half years I haven't read a story that is so much like my own either. I just wanted you to know I'm thinking of you.

Monday musings

So as it turns out the ticker is fine. Stress is the reason for the sudden (and, in my mind, alarming) increase in the frequency of my heart palpitations.

It took a while to get the results back (evidently cardiologists and family doctors see nothing wrong with buzzing off all footloose and fancy free on vacation while I sit at home worrying about my impending cardiac arrest.) but all's well that ends well. My heart is just fine.

Which of course means that my head is the problem.

Faaaaaantastic.

__________________

On Saturday My Beloved and I went to a local maple syrup festival with my sister-in-law and my five-year old nephew (who, incidentally, is the cutest and smartest five-year old on the planet).

It was bone-chillingly cold, but the bonfires, candy shanty, scavenger hunt and maple syrup drenched pancakes and sausage more than made up for the biting wind.

I was having a really good time.

But on the wagon ride back from the pancake house the "if" word crept into my head. Because, of course, if Thomas was alive, we'd have taken him too. He would have been sitting beside me and his cousin in the wagon, bumping along, giggling and enjoying the beautiful winter day with his family. With me.

If instantly crushed my heart.

But I battled back.

"Yes," I told If, "We would have brought Thomas along. But this is still a good day. The sun is shining, my tummy is full of pancakes, and I'm spending time with another little boy that I love. It's still a good day. It is."

And If shut up.

__________________

I bought a shadowbox, finally. I've been wanting to take some of Thomas' things and display them in a small shadow box for a long time. His crib card, the hat the nurses bought him, his wrist band, maybe even the little lock of hair they saved for us. They're all still tucked up in the lacy white fabric bag they hospital quietly gave us after he died.

I brought the shadowbox home, got out the bag, took everything out, and almost instantly felt sick to my stomach.

I couldn't do it. I smelled the little hat, which has been sealed in a plastic baggy, and the hospital still clings to it. I could smell the day he died. I could smell the days after it, the days I refused to leave my room and kept the door shut against the sound of live babies crying all around me.

And I felt sick.

And then achingly guilty for feeling sick.

So I put it all away. Packed it back into the little white bag and put the empty shadowbow in the spare room along with my yarn and Thomas' change table that now doubles as craft supply storage.

It'll be there for me one day when I'm able. If I'm able.

______________________

Today at dinner, after asking me what I was thinking about and listening to my answer, my Beloved paused and said, "There's a lot of thinking going on in that head."

Yeah. And that's the problem.

______________________

I've been having some really, really odd dreams lately. The strangest involved Cher and a sadomasochistic dwarf.

Clearly my sleeping mind is doing its very best to keep me preoccupied lest I think of something very real and very sad.

Excellent job, mind. Excellent job.

But, uh, you can stop now.

_______________________

A very good friend of mine just got herself a brand new nephew. A beautiful, chubby legged little boy joined their family a few days ago, so new he squeaks.

I was snooping through photos of the baby posted on her sister's Facebook profile, when I suddenly realized I was dizzy.

I was loving the pictures and then, in an instant, had to get them off my screen.

This is all new, these physical reactions to grief. Feeling sick, feeling faint. All new. And annoying and disturbing.

I tested myself today by watching a few minutes of A Baby Story.

Just so you know, I'm not ready for that either.

___________________

March came so quickly.

I might not be ready for A Baby Story, but even though it snuck up on me, I'm ready for March.

We have Thomas' special birthday plans made, I have work to do this week and a children's art class to teach next week during March break, and I'm ready for all of it. I am.

I miss the boy. I miss the boy dreadfully during March. But I'm looking forward to celebrating his birthday in the cozy way we've settled into remembering it.

And I know he'd approve. And that's all that matters.

We're not so different

I can't believe Thomas' third birthday is coming up so fast. More than that, I can't believe he'd be three. Three already.

It was so easy to keep track of what exactly I was mourning when he'd just died because I knew what I was missing in a very tangible sense. I'd just seen him. Held him. Kissed him.

But now? Now I'm mourning for a three-year old I've never seen as well as my little baby. And I've already mourned for the one-year old and two-year old he would have been.

I didn't realize, in those dark, early days, how the mourning would change. I was so fixated on losing that beautiful little baby boy with his Daddy's chin that it didn't occur to me, at least right away, that I'd be mourning so much more than that, on and on and on for the rest of my life.

It's a fact I'm now acutely aware of, particularly as each birthday approaches.

I watch other children his age and see what I'm missing. I see the ghost of my child in them.

I sometimes wonder if it's healthy to think this way - to think so much about what Thomas would be like now and to feel the loss of that boy as well as the baby I did know.

But since this is the only way I know how to mourn a dead child (and as far as I know there's no manual for dealing with maternal grief), I'm just going to run with it. To do otherwise feels like I'd somehow be leaving him behind - and denying the mourning process that feels right and natural to me.

I don't dwell on it, the boy he'd be now, but it crosses my mind. How can it not? How can I see a child Thomas' age and not think about what he'd be like? How can it not make me miss him more? Or, at the very least, wonder about what might have been?

I can't help it. Maybe it's a mother thing. Maybe you are always this connected to your children, living or dead.

I find it interesting that no one blinks an eye when mothers of living children are consumed by thoughts of their children - of their daily doings, their accomplishments, their achievements, their triumphs and failures - but people furrow their brows and worry when the mother of a dead baby admits she thinks about her lost child.

I have yet to meet a mother - any mother - who can "let go" of her children.

We're not so different. We're not.

What a day it was

Today was my birthday. My Beloved surprised me by taking the day off, making me pancakes for breakfast, showering me with presents of gardening books and baking tools, and then and making an almost 6-hour long round trip (including lunch and a period of about an hour where we drove around in giant circles, hopelessly lost) to a yarn factory outlet far, far away.

It was excellent. All of it. And at the end of the day there was a great big piece of chocolate cake and a great big chocolate milkshake to wash it all down.

Excellent, excellent, excellent.

If you're going to turn 37, this is definitely the way to do it.

Love

"The love, the love is overwhelming. It's huge, and, at least for now, it's painful. I realized a little bit ago that I love my children exactly the same, exactly the way a mother should-- the same. It's strange to love these two people the same-- one who I have watched grow for five years, and one I only got to hold after he was gone. It took me several weeks to realize that, and for now it hurts. It hurts because there is nothing I can do to show my son this love. I hope it gets better with time."

This comment made me ache.

The desperate love I had for my son and the awful feeling that I had no way to lavish it upon him after he died made me crazy in those early days. I think it's why I spent so much time choosing his grave marker, and why it felt like the most important thing in the world for me to do. I believed it was all I could do. Ever.

Because the love you show to a baby is so physical. We kiss, we hug, we tuck in, we rock, we nurse, we pick up, we swaddle, we cuddle. Our bodies are in almost constant contact with a newborn, as they were when we were carrying them.

So when your child dies and you find yourself with empty arms and too much time, that terrible and confusing feeling of having all that love and no one to give it to is agonizing.

It's probably why I still occasionally find myself tucking in My Beloved - a 37-year old man who is quite capable of pulling the blankets up by himself.

But as time has passed, I've settled in to a comfortable rhythm with Thomas. When I let myself think about it too long and too hard, my arms still find themselves empty and useless, but most of the time they don't. My love for him is about more than what I can physically do for him. It's about so much more than that - as is every mother's love.

I talk to him. A lot, actually. And I remember him and love him with a fierce passion I can't begin to put into words. And I keep his spirit alive by speaking his name - by making him part of conversations with family and friends. And, of course, I write about him here.

My greatest fear has always been that he'll just fade away, eventually becoming something people are too uncomfortable to talk about. By keeping him alive as part of my life, I show my love for him. Every day.

And Julia, you do too. I know you do.

As Thomas' birthday draws near, I've been reminded in a very tangible way that people do remember our beautiful boy, and I'm more grateful than I can adequately express for the comfort and happiness it brings me.

It's not even his birthday yet, and donations have been made to:

United States Fund for Unicef
St. Jude Research Hospital
Children's Wish Foundation of Canada
The Heifer Project (a donation of a flock of geese to a family in the third world)
St. Louis Zoo (a sea lion adoption)
Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation (for pediatric cancer research)
A hospital's NICU (local to the donor)
Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis
S.O.S Children's Village, BC (Family care service for Foster children and Foster families)
B.C. Children's Hospital
Operation Smile
Children's Memorial Hospital, Chicago
Red Cross (Blood donation)
Make A Child Smile
TEARS Foundation (offers financial funeral assistance to bereaved parents)
A donor's Church's school (which aids community youth)
Walk America (March of Dimes)

I don't take any credit for the incredible and overwhelming generosity of the people who have made these donations in Thomas' memory, but I do believe that the love that My Beloved and I show for him is at least a small part of the reason why people are moved to specifically remember him.

So I know that he sees my love - and I know he feels it. It's not your average mother/son relationship, true, but it's every bit as strong, important and real as it would be if he was still here.

And it always will be.