You don't lose a baby.
You lose your car keys, one sock to complete a pair, a tube of lip gloss. You don't lose a baby.
Your baby dies.
When your baby dies you lose a huge chunk of yourself. A gaping hole lives inside of you.
You don't know if you can smile again or if you even will ever want to.
It feels as if your muscles are suffering from amnesia. It's hard to remember how to smile . . . how to laugh. You forget what its like to move without feeling like you are trying to walk on the bottom of the ocean floor.
When your baby dies, you feel that you have too. You wish it had been you instead and you just can't understand why its wasn't. You have lived, they never really got to and where's the sense and nature in that?
When your baby dies because your body went into pre-term labor, how do you ever trust your body again? It betrayed you in a way it never should. How do you ever trust it again?
When your baby dies, there is a distinct line drawn. A line that separates your life into two parts - a before and an after. A line that has separated you into two - the person who you once were and the person you are now . . . whoever that is.
When your baby dies, you wish you could go back to the before, if just for a day so you could hold onto that lightness, joy and innocence a little bit tighter in the hopes you could remember everything about it for your life in the after.
When your baby dies you wonder how you will go on. You wonder if you will ever again possess the desire to go on at all.
When your baby dies, you are scared that the grief will become you. And you are scared that it won't. Because if it does, that means life is forever colored in shades of black. If it doesn't, you are scared that it means you have forgotten your baby.
When your baby dies and you smile again and not in a forced manner to falsely assure others that you are "fine" but truly smile and it registered that you did, it instantly throws you back and you wonder if that means you have forgotten. And that is the worse because if you forget, everyone else will too.
When your baby dies, you wrestle with everything you believed before. You don't want to believe in a God that allowed you to bury your child. You believe in the hope of heaven so you can't deny the God who created it.
When your baby dies, you wrestle. You struggle. You fear. You grieve.
When your baby dies, your heart still contracts and your lungs still take in air. And you eventually learn that the contractions and the breathing in and breathing out don't betray that your baby lived. It's a way to live . . . to speak . . . to remember . . . to honor them.
Stephanie
