Since I didn't start writing on our blog until Baker had been gone for 6 months, I feel the need to share some of my thoughts from the early days of my grief, when the pain was so raw that I gasped and choked for breath. For the next few posts, possibly for the next several months, I'm going to share excerpts of what I wrote one year ago in my journal. I carried the notebook, stuffed with a few select cards that I read and re-read, like a security blanket in my purse to work, along with a small photo album of Baker's pictures. In the days leading up to what should have been his first birthday, I cracked the book for the first time in months and remembered through my tears. It doesn't take long to get back to that place. These were the first words I could manage to get down on paper, exactly one year ago today.
April 22, 2008
I did not ask for this. It is so unfair and totally sucks. I don't want to be a grieving mother. I just want my baby. My beautiful baby boy. I want him more than anything. I'd give anything to change this. This isn't how it was supposed to turn out. I feel lost. I feel empty without my baby. I feel hopeless and aimless. I am afraid of the dark. I am afraid that we'll get hit by a car or that Chris will get hurt and killed. I feel paralyzed and in a daze. I have trouble remembering things. Baker died almost 3 weeks ago. I should have a 3-week old newborn. We should be taking Baker out for walks in the sunshine in his stroller. We should be figuring out nursing and be waken in the nighttime by his baby cries. We should be changing his diapers and rocking him to sleep and watching him breathe. I want to see his eyes look at me. I want to hold him and smell him and comfort him. Instead, we are left with an empty house, a quiet bassinet, a room full of hopes and sadness, and our baby in the ground. It isn't right and it isn't fair.
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7 comments:
I'm sorry Dalene. It's hard to go back to that place, to remember how broken we were, and will always be.
Oh Dalene, this reads like a page out of my diary. So familiar, too familiar. I am sorry all over again.
I wish so much that there was a rewind button for life, and I wish I had some power to change this for all of you. Thank you for sharing these thoughts, so raw. Hope you and little baby are well.
Incredible how the journal entry you wrote a year ago is still relevant today.
I had such similar thoughts right after my son died and I still feel so much of it even a year and a half later.
Thank you for sharing your words from last year.
This is where I am. Exactly where I am in this journey - three weeks. God, it's been three weeks? Thank you for posting this. I needed to read it. Thank you.
Yes, yes ... to every word of it.
Dalene, yes, yes to all of it. And those fears of further disaster, how real it seemed that everything, anything I had left would crumble, too. I was terrified every night, convinced my husband would stop breathing beside me.
Discovering your blog, I've learned you and I are on a very similar timeline. I lost my first child a year ago last April. I'm now attempting a second, due in July. I've just started writing and sharing as well, going over the unbelievable pain of those first days and weeks of grief, the raw details, trying finally to bring those words to light.
I'll be reading as you write and remember, abiding with you. Hoping, too.
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