Life After Loss

I don't know where that came from.  Babycakes. It's so random. Your dad laughed the first time he heard me call you that. You were still in the NICU. But guess what? He was calling you babycakes by the time we brought you home. Your room looks just like how it did when we first brought you home. I would do anything to have you here with us again. Or to have traded places with you. We had hope. We prayed. We begged for you to be okay. We held on so tightly to all the good things the doctors would tell us. We knew you were going to wake up, how could we ever survive if you didn't? Yet, it's been over 9 months and we are surviving. Some days it's just barely, but we are.  How is it that you've been gone for as long as you were here? In some ways it seems like you took your last breath just yesterday, in other ways it feels like a different lifetime. I remember everything about your hospital room. I remember the beeping. The little ray of ...

Every time I hear about another child gaining their angel wings, my heart stops.  I imagine these small, innocent, beautiful human beings who never even got a chance to fully experience life. I think of how their parent's lives are forever changed. I think about how the parents will be in a complete fog for the next days, weeks, or even months to come. How you can't wrap your head around the fact that your child is no longer here on Earth with you. Even if you knew your child was battling such a big fight, it does seem like they will ever leave you. How can a child's life be taken from you? Everything must get better. I think about how I was torn at Arianna's wake. I remember crying very minimally. I remember looking at my husband and smiling. It felt like we were being torn. It took everything we had to even be there, standing. But at the same time, we got to remember Arianna's legacy and celebrate her life. We felt the support from so many people and we...

Everyday there is a choice to be made. Am I going to get up and get done what I need to do or is today going to be the day that I let myself feel the loss? It sounds crazy, I know. I feel the loss every single day of my life. But the vast majority of days I am running from it. I'm so afraid that if I let myself go there again, there's no coming back. That I'm jumping into the ocean off a huge cliff with no life vest. But I do have a life vest. My husband and my family. But somehow it feels like it's not enough. That if I jump, even with their support, I will just bring us all down. I'm told to embrace the grief. That if I run from it and don't face it that it will only make things worse. But it still seems too unreal. How in the world is our perfect girl gone? How do all those months of doing the absolute best parenting we could not mean anything anymore? How was she here one day and not the next? How did we live in a hospital for 3 weeks? How did we watch ...

After losing a child, you begin to look for them everywhere. You stop to listen to the birds chirp, you notice the butterfly that lands right by you, you look for clouds that are shaped like angels or hearts. The sky has been where I find myself looking the most. I love to see the beautiful sunrises and sunsets and hope that somehow Arianna was involved. Like the sky is her canvas and she's just up there painting away. There's something more magical about the sun shining through the clouds now than ever before. I cling to these things because more than anything I want to know that she is still with me. That she's watching over us and is smiling. That she truly is in a better place (although I still think that the best place for a child is in their mother's arms...). That she is no longer in pain. That she can move, and walk, and talk, and is singing in the angel's choir (apparently Arianna is extremely talented!). You just want to know that your child is ok. T...

People say time heals all wounds. As a grieving mother, I disagree. I think that with time we learn how to carry our grief and how to cope with the waves. I think that there are good days, and there are bad. I think that you may be able to take one wave of grief head on, but the next wave make knock you down. And I think that it is absolutely ok.  It's important to know that falling down doesn't mean you're weak. That tears streaming down your face in public because you see another mom with her daughter doesn't mean that you're somehow "stuck in the past". Life changes drastically when you give birth to a child. All that you thought you knew about parenting goes out the window. Your routine completely changes. It's all for the better of course. When you lose a child, it's new territory. You now need to learn a different routine. One that feels empty. Without any purpose. And you just hope that there will be good days again. Once the go...

I was showing my mom Arianna's lab results on the board in her room. A man we hadn't met yet walked in the room. Mom sat down in her chair. Gonz was sitting on our couch. He introduced himself. Dr. Soandso from Neurosurgery. My mom's face went white. She asked a question, her voice was shaking. Me, being so casual said, "Mom, don't worry. Just because he's from neurosurgery doesn't mean that Arianna needs brain surgery or anything. What's going on?" His response "Well, actually she does need brain surgery and we need your signature now." I don't remember what happened after that. I remember our nurse kicking him out of the room and yelling at him. I remember being brought into a conference room and being shown the CT scan from that morning. I remember throwing a box of Kleenex and it hitting some poor girl I hadn't seen before. I remember being told if we didn't sign these papers then our daughter wasn't goin...

You know how sometimes you have those days where one bad thing just happens after another and you think how could all this be possibly happening in one day? Today was kind of like that for me. First, I dropped my phone--in the toilet. Yeah, had to place a claim to get a new one. Then, I was all excited to eat my chicken and rice (yummy!), but I needed to eat at my desk since I didn't have a working phone and the clock in the break room is broken. No big deal. I gather up my stuff and head on upstairs. Anyone who knows me knows I'm the BIGGEST klutz in the world. Yep, I fell (going up the stairs, not even down) and bam, I watch in slow motion as my chicken and rice fly through the air. All of it. None was savable.  So somehow I managed to laugh this all off. It got me thinking, I haven't had a day like this in a long time. I've had way to many horrible days, but not where it's these random individual events. Then I smiled. The old Heather would hav...