PagesThe Hospital: Trying to save our babies, moment by moment --via Caring Bridge

Sunday, March 29, 2015

Is grief a mutating virus?

Or a crystal in the light?  Just when my eyes seem to have conceptualized the awful totality, a slight breeze or a cloud or the earth's rotation shifts the input and fragmented light blinds me with new glare, more or less intense, striking a chord within me that I didn't know existed. Over and over and over.  I am so restless and yet not able to focus long enough to create a plan or solution to this irritable lack of peace.  I can understand the appeal of drugs and alcohol, perhaps to numb these feelings, perhaps to make everything seem as strange and unfamiliar as this devastating loss.

We now have all the pieces to put together our babies memorial cards with the invitations to their service and the thank you cards.  Photos of our tiny babies accompanied by their unbelievably small and perfect footprints, together on the page as they never were outside the womb.  The last step is for me to glue the tiny hearts I crocheted to the slips of pink card stock thanking everyone for their kindnesses.  I can't quite make myself.  It's not a hard task.  These hearts have been one of my primary coping mechanisms, when I feel like I can't breathe, when I'm overwhelmed with the idea of time continuing, I have been able to focus on each of the three stitches necessary to make a heart.  Magic ring, chain four, triple crochet three, double crochet three, triple crochet one and repeat in reverse.  Like my experience as a mom, this is a very limited activity.  I learned these three stitches from youtube and have never crocheted anything else.  Glueing these hearts to cards announcing our babies' life and death is another finalization of their permanent absence.

My love and grief are creating tangible shifts in the light, just enough to render me blind and directionless.

4 comments:

  1. I am here, bearing witness to your grief and loss. My heart aches for you and your family. I wish I could reach out to you and offer a shoulder to cry on and a hand to hold. <3

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  2. I've been very conflicted about how to handle his 'burial' (we have cremains) because I'm not sure what's appropriate or what would be therapeutic to us. Like your post about the color blue (btw, I heard that news story too and thought it so curious) this is in a strange gray area for most people, and I don't know if I want the hoopla of a full service. We plan to release his ashes over the ocean, maybe a small boat, immediate family. I'm so glad I have another person's perspective to work from, xo

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  3. I am so incredibly sorry for your loss. We are having our service this Saturday, just over and almost three months since we met and lost our perfect, sweet babies. I think waiting was a good plan for us - I'll probably flip back and forth about that repeatedly until sometime after Saturday. My thoughts are with you and your family.

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