Waves

Tomorrow Ryder would have been 11 months old.  11 months.

Grief is something difficult to understand unless you are drowning in it.  I have been reading grief books, books about loss, all written by people who lost a child.  For the most part these books are just awful, really.  I am not really sure why I am reading them; maybe because I feel so much pain sometimes I want someone to tell me it will be better.  Or maybe sometimes I feel numb and want someone to tell me something I should be feeling.  Probably the real reason, though, is that sometimes I catch myself being completely happy; and when I realize this I am overwhelmed with guilt and this hurts almost as much as the sadness, which prompts the sadness to take over once again.

Grief is like standing in the ocean.  It comes only in the form of waves.  Suddenly everything seems still, quiet, and then you get a rush...but it isn't sorrow...it's joy.  Addy is my joy, when she laughs, when she sings to her babies, when she stumbles into my bed in the morning and says "I need to snuggle wif you." But just as quickly as that joy hits you and you bask in the thankfullness of your blessings and you have time to feel the sun warm your face, the wave goes back out to sea...and you stand alone again.  Slowly you feel the joy slip away, and as you watch it retreat into the distance, and you feel empty again; you realize what you have lost.  Even though you should expect this feeling, you never really know when it will come.  I drove to work a few weeks ago maybe, and at a red light I stopped and looked over at a patch of grass, I wasn't thinking of anything really...but I saw Ryder sitting there!  He looked at me and grabbed a handful of grass and examined it...and then put it in his mouth...and I cried the rest of the way to work.  Why would a patch of grass do that?  Ryder never even touched grass.  In the beginning it isn't hard to deal with these waves because they are unexpected and nobody really expects you to deal with anything really...the difficult part is as time passes...when you know that the waves will keep coming and going.  The loss isn't once or twice, it's over and over and over.  It's forever.  Every time you feel the wave of joy you know that what will come next is the pain.  That knowing is hard, and nobody can really tell you if or when it gets better.  You can only pray that it will.

It seems intuitive, but what I never really spent any time considering is what a parent actually mourns when a child dies.  If your child is very young, a baby, or even a miscarriage, you mourn potential, the "future" or at least what your mind already created for you as dreams and expectations of this child.  As the child gets older you mourn the loss of things that existed, their personality, their talents and traits, their physical presence.  I sit in Ryder's bedroom sometimes and think about all the hopes I had for our life with him, but I cannot even imagine the pain of feeling his presence here in our house.  I am sorry for Ross as he has to drive to Ryder's "home" to work everyday, and then leave without seeing him.  I have been back there only once.  The day after Ryder died.  I sat for hours in the lobby.  Thankfully, I couldn't wander up to the PICU again, since Ross had cut my security band off me the night before.  It is so odd to think about - being back and forth to someplace soooo many times, for so long, for 9 months and 2 days, sleeping there every other night on the couch even...and then this place and all the people there are suddenly gone from your life too.  It has been hard to convince myself Ryder isn't there.  It's hard to convince myself that he isn't at Floral Hills either...he isn't cold and he isn't wearing his Christmas pajamas in a white box.

We went to Mexico the day after Christmas...it was a last minute trip to get away, just the 3 of us...VERY far away.  It felt strange to say the least - I had not left Kansas City in over a year...and leaving the country, for that matter going anywhere more that a 10 min drive from a Children's Hospital was something that we had assumed we would never be doing again as a family.  Of course, as soon as the plane took off  I felt so guilty, so sorry, but I honestly would have given anything to be petting my little warrior's head, singing him a song, and sleeping across from him on that plastic couch just one more time.  But, he was there with us...he sent sunrises and sunsets, and an amazing moon...

And it was really reassuring to stand in the actual ocean, to feel the cold of waves but also the warm of the sun.  It was good to be together...and also to feel that we were not alone.

I miss you buddy...so much.