And My World Goes Quiet...

Each approaching day gets more quiet and more quiet. It's almost like submersing yourself slowly in water where you hear nothing and block all sound out. On purpose. Because that's how you cope, how you remember, how you revere the time that you want to etch in stone so it can never be forgotten or erased. Partly because that's how you ward off tears, or outbursts. Just because it works for you.

That is a picture of Lucas. Everyone knows that the experts say not to put a sleeping young infant on his/her tummy, but he did sleep best on his tummy. Here he was napping on the couch downstairs and we raised the pillow, you can see we slanted it with a basketball under it. I can remember countless countless days I would sleep on the floor under him. If he was sleeping, the house was quiet, it was a different infanthood with him. We knew his heart was not well, and we tiptoed around quite a bit for him. Never did that with the Oldest or Littlest. Only Lucas. Situation was so different with him. Our whole world changed when he was born. Then it changed drastically when he died.

Friday, August 21st will be six years ago that he died. Since then, we have become changed people. At some forks in the road, I remember looking around me saying, 'gosh, don't rush me, I'm grieving as fast as I can' because and I suppose to this day, I feel guilty for being sad. I feel guilty for moving on. I feel guilty for handing him over to that nurse. I feel guilty for not being able to make it all stop, reverse it all and make it go away. I feel guilty that I did not 'pray hard enough'. The list goes on and on. BUT we have moved forward, mostly in his honor, for him, so he can say he is proud that we did not fall down and stay down. We didn't crumble. We may have cried, but we did not crumble. We have lived. We have moved ahead and put things in their places. The gold dust of his soul has been captured in my words, our pictures, and our memories. There is not one other thing we can do about it. Make good out of sorrow. That's what we can do. I won't lie and say my heart doesn't ache to hold his smiling face and hear his coos and babbles again. But I know that I can't. And so...I can hope. I can hope that even though I let my world go quiet when I'm hurting, and pull back from almost everything around me, I can hope that it's true. Hopefully it's true that what are years and years to us are only seconds to those in Heaven. That all these years later are simple heartbeats and not even minutes for that baby angel who I pray isn't just waiting for his Mamma. That would be cruel I think and so I believe he barely knows I'm gone. It gets me through.

So a close friend did this recently while at the beach and sent it to me. Thank you Liz. You are an incredible person who helps me on more than a few levels.

If you've been reading here you know the story, and you know my take on it all. You may not know this...... I'm grateful that he was born and I know that there is purpose in his death. I don't understand it yet but I know there has to be purpose for it. That is not lost on me and I am well aware of it. I can say that now. I really can.

We miss you Lucas and you know I tell it to you every single day. I love you with a million hearts, even one of those hearts may have been better than the one you were born with and I would have given you mine.. as any mother would do. I honor your presence and your life and know that one day I'll be holding you again; as it should be.

Mamma.