Life lessons

When I take my dad to the hospital for dialysis I always go in and wait with him. He doesn't need it - he's perfectly capable of walking in on his own, getting registered and waiting in the outer lounge to be called in for treatment - but I enjoy spending that time with him, just the two of us.

We chat about all kinds of things while he chomps away on his ice chips. Sometimes I stare intently at his face, trying desperately to memorize every little feature while he talks, but I am listening closely too. Hearing the sound of his voice, now weak, but still full of fire and life.

For a hospital waiting area, the dialysis lounge is actually pretty nice. Comfy chairs, dark paneled cupboards, a great ice machine (so I'm told), and a TV, all tucked away from view of the hospital lobby. It's as cozy and as non-threatening as it can possibly be.

But, you know, it's still a hospital waiting room. And there are enough old, sweet faces in there to break your heart a million times over.

I focus on my dad, but when there are lulls in our conversation, my eyes wander to the other souls waiting in the room. And yesterday, I overheard enough of a conversation between one patient and a dietitian to change the way I view my own little world, tragedies and sorrow and all.

She's only in her late 40s, I'd say, and in addition to dealing with renal failure, she is obviously struggling with some form of mental illness - a fact that became very clear yesterday when I overheard part of her discussion with one of the renal dietitians.

As I watched her face register fear and sorrow - flicking back and forth between the two as she told her story -  I thought about my own life. About what's going on right now.

I miss my son. With every single cell in my body, I miss that boy every moment of every day. And I ache for my dad, and for what he's going through - and for the awful toll it's taken on his mind and body over the last five months. And every day I worry that my mom will call and tell me he's gone. And I worry about her too - and my sister. And I wonder if I'm doing the right things, doing enough, saying enough, or maybe saying too little. Or saying too much.

And sometimes I find myself consumed with it all. Worried, sad, distracted. Swallowed whole.

But as I sat in the dialysis waiting room yesterday listening, I thought about the good bits. Dad is still here. There is a Kristin-shaped dent in my mattress next to a Sandy-shaped dent. I wake up to Dibley-the-Wonder-Cat kisses on a regular basis. I laugh until my stomach hurts. I can walk. I can see. I am loved. I love back.

I am still here.

And life, despite all its sorrow, is often so good I can barely breathe.

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.

oxox

I was cleaning out my overflowing in tray this morning and found an old love note My Beloved wrote to me a week after our first date, a little more than 9 years ago. It's all raggedy and battered from the number of times I've read it and carried it around and held it to my chest and smiled.

His words have the lightness of feathers. He was so young and so completely unfettered by sorrow and tragedy. I can hear his joy. His hope. His love.

And what he wrote about me? The girl he saw through rose-coloured glasses? I sound like a completely different person too.

He once told me, long ago, that I was like a perfect doll that had somehow gotten thrown into a box of broken toys, ending up overlooked and unloved.

And I think about how battered and bruised and jaded I am and wonder if I'm now one of the broken toys too. I must be.

I am no longer the person he fell in love with. I'm not the girl he describes on that page.

I know that's how it goes. You fall in love with someone and together you grow old, facing everything life throws at you along the way; huddling close during storms and turning your faces to the sun when the skies clear. Things change you, both good and bad, and the bond deepens and strengthens - if you're lucky. And we are. We are.

But when I read the note I found myself missing those two people who were on the brink of a great romance, dizzy with the flush of new-found love. I miss their innocence and their optimism and the promise that they believed life held for them.

Luckily, with time and experience comes the ability to see the bigger picture.

Because even in the midst of our loss, we have somehow gained. Our love - older and wiser - is not less than it was simply because we're no longer those young, undamaged people we once were. It's actually very much the opposite. It's bigger and deeper than it has ever been because in many ways we have become one, united against our grief and in our mutual determination to find happiness. Together.

We are warriors now. Fighting for survival, sanity and peace.

I miss the man he was. But I love the man he is.

And when I need to, I have a silly love letter to remember once upon a time while I'm walking towards happily every after.

Family Tree of Grief

Novelist Elizabeth McCracken was living a fantasy life in France with her husband, eagerly anticipating the birth of their first child whom they'd nicknamed Pudding. When she learned her baby would be stillborn her world fell apart. Searching for a geographic cure for her sadness, the author writes in this excerpt from her new book, she found an unexpected community.

An excerpt from Elizabth's book, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination: A Memoir (which I am now going to have to immediately run out and purchase).

But first...

To all the mothers of dead babies who I have found in my travels online and in the world, and to whom I owe so much credit and thanks for where I am today, I just want to say that, like Elizabeth McCracken, I love you in a way that no one who has not walked in our shoes can ever begin to understand.

And I will always, always remember.

I remember...

On August 21st of last year, I lost the twins. My tiny Tigers who we desperately willed to live over and over again. Who we begged to be more than just empty sacs. Who gave us the kind of hope and joy we hadn't felt in more than two years.

I finally had a D&C at 12 weeks after a compassionate OB took pity on us and put us out of our collective misery.

The day passed without me remembering until late in the evening. A flash. The date. My sorrow.

I felt a flicker of guilt, but the thing is, we lost them countless time during the 6 weeks I knew I was pregnant. We rode the roller coaster of hope and despair so many times - being told they were fine, being told there was nothing there, being told there was "something" there, being told that there was, finally and conclusively, no hope at all.

We mourned and hoped so much during those torturous 6 weeks that the date I finally said goodbye doesn't seem particularly momentous at all.

Plus, it was complicated by hemorrhaging and a hospital stay.

'Cause that's how I roll.

But I do think of them, my little Tigers. I sometimes stop and marvel at my body's ability to get pregnant with twins without any help at all. And I revel in a brief flush of pride - until it is replaced by anger at this same body's inability to do what it should. What it was allegedly born to do.

And, of course, I think of what might have been.

I realized, a few weeks after the D&C, that I had unconsciously named them. I called them the "Tigers" while I was pregnant, but after they were gone, I started thinking of them as Molly and Joseph. A boy and a girl.

And the names stuck.

We don't actually know what they were, of course, but they are Molly and Joseph to me - for absolutely no good reason other than the fact that names seemed to want to belong to them.

And today, more than a year after they came and went, I wanted to say that I remember.

And I love you, little ones.

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.