Grief Math

 Nine days until his 12th birthday. 

12 - the number of days he was alive
12 - the number of years without him

Make it make sense that he's now been gone the same number of years as the number of days he was alive.

12 x 365 + 3 - 21 = 4,362

12 years
365 days in a year
3 leap years
21 days until the anniversary of his death

All brings me to 4,362 days without him. 

Multiplying by every year that passes by to mark the increasing number of days since he's been gone. 
But the number of days he was alive will always be 12. 

12 exciting days
12 nerve-wracking days
12 beautiful days
12 love-filled days
12 intense days
1 worst day of my life. 

All for you

Note: I wrote this sitting at an overlook off the Blue Ridge Parkway admiring the fall leaves. 

This is such a beautiful time of year.
As I sit at an overlook on the parkway,
with tourists here just to get a peep of these colors,
These colors we live so close to

I contemplate your upcoming birthday
The excitement that should be abounding
The grief in it's place instead.

The beauty of this life is so vast,
But the pain remains so deep. 
The ache within my soul 
That follows me everywhere. 

The contrast
Of such sorrow with joy. 

I soak in the view of these mountains
So colorful
Trying to reach for some serenity
In a moment of turmoil. 

I want to feel peace
To feel calm
To feel full
But in this moment I feel, 
Broken.

Broken by your absence
Yet full of love,
For you

And love for more
But this is about you
My babe
Forever my 12 day old babe. 

For you
Your deep dark eyes
Your softest of soft hair
Your skin against mine

This is for you and
The space you left behind, 
In my heart, 
In this world, 
In our family. 

Always a space
Where you should be.

How to wrap up these thoughts? 
I'm unsure
I could continue on forever 
With this dialogue to you

Forever expressing
My love
My grief
For you...

All for you,
All for you,
Marcellus Robert. 

Nonsensical Time

The days blend
One into another.
Then
        Now
                When?
Distinction lost
Within the grief.
The past is the present.
The future never to come.
Locked, stuck in today.
Today that is
Today that was
But what is today?
What was yesterday?
When is not
What was when
When your heart is dark
When grief swallows light.
When what was is not
When who was is no more
When 12 days will be all there ever was
And grief swallows time
Spits it out crumbled and incomprehensible
When I blink time flashes
Then I blink again and time feels like sludge
With no in between
Only nonsensical time.

Should it still be this hard?

You think 11 years in and I'd be used to this feeling. This dread and ache that October brings. Eleven years of doing this and it still gets me every time. Every time the air cools and the leaves start to change. Every time the pumpkin spice is rolled out and Halloween decor put up. Every single fucking year, it all just crashes around me. So here I am, my eleventh October without him, trying to figure out how to make it through the month. Not only the month of October, but then past the anniversary of his death. Trying to stay afloat with all the obligations that life brings, that his living siblings bring, all with my heart in the depths of grief. 

And I'm feeling that grief so intensely right now. Sometimes I question myself, should it still be this hard?, should it still hurt this much? I don't know if it should, but it is this hard and it does hurt this much. Right now at least. Maybe not as constantly as it once did. It comes in waves. One of those waves is hitting now. Knocking me down. Down hard enough it feels like I can't get up. But logically I know I will. I know I'll likely wake up tomorrow not feeling so intensely. But I also know that another wave can come by at any time and do it again. 

I think I've been putting too much energy into fighting it. Fighting against the grief, fighting against the feeling of being knocked down. There are times I really just need to lean into it. To let the wave take me. Because no matter how much time has passed, it will always just really fucking suck that he died. So tonight after the kids went to bed I intentionally got out my journal and just let the feelings come. Just let the tears come and come and come. Instead of attempting to hold the grief close to my heart, I let it move. I let it wash over me. 

So for the next month I need to remember to have grace and patience with myself. I need to remember that it's okay for me to feel up and down with big emotions that take over. That it's okay to have happy, calm, peaceful days. And it's okay to have hard, grief-filled, difficult days. Or to have both scenarios in the same day. Yes, it's been 11 years. But the grief of losing a baby is honestly beyond comprehension. There's no timeline. There's just continuing to move forward. But that doesn't mean I won't get knocked on my ass here and there, especially during the month of October and the beginning of November. Yeah, I'm putting these words in my blog to send out into the internet for other people to read...but they're really for me. They're really some important reminders for myself. I'm doing the best I can during a difficult time. And I will get through it and the next time it happens I'll still be doing the best I can. It's all any of us can do. So, as I often tell my kids, we just gotta keep on keeping on. 

Additional note: I went back and read this post I wrote in Oct 2017. It's all still accurate. 

Don't they know

My gmail keeps telling me I’m almost out of storage

But don’t they know that I can’t just blindly delete the past

Don’t they know that inbox holds a snapshot in time

Of when you were alive

Of what my life was like when you were in it

Don’t they know that’s all I have of you

… a snapshot.

Such a short moment in the amount of time that is my life

That every piece of evidence of your existence

Or of what I was doing during your existence

Is priceless

 

I thought to myself that I’d clear some emails out

Thought it would be quicker to go oldest to newest

And just bulk delete all those emails from years and years ago

 

But I was wrong

It wasn’t quicker

Because it caused me to freeze

Even trying to do the “Promotions” first

I froze when I saw that email from baby center

The email I starred to come back to later for a discount on diapers

And then my frozen self froze even more when I saw

An email I sent asking for help enhancing your photos

So brief was the snapshot of your life that it quickly turned in to the eternity of marking your death

Asking for help to fix the color of you in the moments immediately after your death

Help for the only photos I have of you without tubes and wires

Help me treasure these photos of my dead baby

Help me makes sense of this aspect of my life

Help

A Grieving Mother's Heart

When your baby dies your heart shatters on the floor. 
Your heart there in pieces, millions of sharp-edged shards. 
Shock renders you immobile. It feels impossible that the pieces will ever go back together. 
You just stare at the pieces. Unsure of how to continue on. 

The first time you attempt to pick them up they cut deep. They bleed. 
You can't grasp them. Yet your being somehow continues on with your heart still shattered.

The next time you can pick up a few pieces. You can hold them in grief. 
But yet, they don't go back together. You set them back down gently with the other shards.

Eventually you find some string to tie some pieces back together. 
It holds...temporarily. But it easy slips apart leaking heart pieces back to the floor. 
And over and over and over again the string is cut, rendering it useless.

But you try again and again and again to have the string hold your heart together.
And during some of this time it's secured, some of the pieces mend back together.
You oscillate between shards on the floor, putting them back together, and mending. 

At some point enough pieces have mended back together that the string is no longer necessary. 
But the repair points are weak. 
There are times your heart cracks. 
There are times pieces break off and fall to the floor. 
There are even times your heart completely shatters again. 

But now you know the process. The process of finding the right string to hold things together.
The process of letting the pieces merge back into place. 
The process of waiting for your heart to feel okay. 

You know it will never be as it was before. 
It will never feel complete. 
There was a piece that never made it back in. 

But you know how to live with this heart you now have. You know how to care for it. You know that while it feels grief, sadness, heartache, pain....that it can also love fiercely, feel joy, gratitude, and peace.

This grieving mother heart, it feels deeply. Be gentle with it.

To Be A Mother

 

11 years ago a positive pregnancy test told me I was to be a mother,
I had given birth before, but yet I had not mothered,
For 8 ½ years I yearned and wondered, what could it be like to mother.

My heart felt mother love,
I felt that shift within me when she was born,
but I had no where, no one, to pour that love to.

 It was Mother’s Day that day,
And I held my secret for hours,
Only sharing with strangers on the internet,
Waiting to tell Mike in person.

Mother’s Day,
A day that had been difficult since she was born,
A day I didn’t know how to view,
Didn’t know where I fit,
Because do birth mothers count as mothers?

How healing in that instant to know,
To know a baby was on the way,
To mother,
A child that I would get to mother,
To call my own.

May 8^th, 2011
Just like this year,
Just like today,
Was Mother’s Day.

It was a day to celebrate,
It was filled with joy,
With hope, excitement,
The sting of the pain caused by placing my firstborn for adoption,
Lessoned for a moment.

And now today,
11 years later,
On this Mother’s Day,
I think of the short 12 days I had to mother him.

12 hectic, fearful, difficult, intense NICU days,
But also 12 beautiful, joyful, love filled days,
12 days I cherish forever.

He may have only been here for 12 days,
But I will forever be his momma.