I just got home from a busy day at work to be met by a pretty expensive bill from our hospital. They keep rolling in much like they did after Sam’s birth. No one talks about these thousand dollar bills that come after your baby has died. Instead of paying for postnatal care you’re paying for things like the Pathology Lab. Almost $500 to them alone and they couldn’t even put my ‘sample’ in the right petri dish. It’s amazing more of us loss Mamas aren’t bitter old women on the outside.
I haven’t written since my heated blog last week. My weekend was full of great love, great life and great loss. It started with a fun annual, local fall festival. I ate way too much fried food for my own good and drank way too much beer with some beautiful people. My favorite part of the weekend was running into so many familiar faces that I haven’t seen in awhile. I received so many hugs but most of all, so much acknowledgment of my babies that I could never begin to describe how meaningful and warm it still makes me feel.
I ran into a friend who told me, “I read every single word you write.” If that weren’t enough he followed with, “Because you share you’ve allowed your babies to keep living.” If you’re reading this sweet friend, my great love of the weekend was you. Your words are music to my loss Mom ears. Sometimes I forget people actually read this blog because so often I spill my heart’s contents on its pages hoping just that, that Sam and Lion will always be thought of, remembered and held in the sacred spaces of more hearts than just my own.
On Saturday, we attended my co-worker/work BFF’s wedding. It was so beautiful and overflowed with great life. My friend and her family radiated love. I cried about fifty times, almost all happy tears, but as I sat and watched her take her vows I began to cry for me. There’s something confusing with saying I’ve been pregnant twice and the happiest day of my life is my wedding. I was thrown back to two and a half years ago as Ted and I stood in front of our family and friends and vowed to take each other; for better or for worse.
I had never anticipated that the worse part might actually happen so soon, if at all. I so fearlessly and hopefully took our vows. The day before our wedding I curled up in a ball in my bed and just hid under the covers. I’m not sure what I was hiding from but I remember thinking ‘you grow up, you get married, you have kids, you die.’ It actually makes me laugh writing it out loud. Ted ended up calling my Mom who rushed over, cuddled next to me in bed, waived her magic fingers over my face and soothed me into a nap. When I awoke, I was perfectly fine.
Life has offered us great life but not without the cost of great loss.
Looking now at my distorted view of reality it’s something like ‘you get married, you have kids who die, a part of you dies, you never grow up because what’s the point?’
We also met a little man with the sweetest head full of hair at my girlfriends wedding. His Mama told us he was a year and half old. We stood in line behind him waiting for dinner and he turned around and just stared at Ted. Ted reached his hand out and it was met with a high-five. I watched the two of them interact for some time.
After visiting Sam yesterday I pulled out of the cemetery and rounded the corner to Sam’s daycare where his swing set sits. In front of me was a beautiful friend of mine picking up her little man. Sometimes I forget until moments like these just how much is missing from our lives. A great loss.
I finished my weekend by attending a yoga nidra class. My teacher calls yoga nidra the “yogic sleep”, that is the magical state of mind between being awake and falling asleep meet. I would describe it as the place at night, right as your drifting off to sleep, conscious but maybe somewhere else, too. Magical is right.
Kim focused on different body parts as she lead us into this other state of being. We focused for a short time on our hands and she asked us, “Do you feel life?” Bare with me here – but I did, and I often do feel life or energy or something in my hands. I’ve always known this about myself but as I lay still and focused on my hands my thoughts immediately turned to them holding Sam and how all I wanted to do was to give him life.
In our minds we compared opposites and then simultaneously joined them together. I thought about the opposites I live every day, happiness and sadness, and how hard I work to bring unity to the two.
She asked us to choose one of four sayings that spoke to us. Out of the four, I chose I am healed. I thought about it for awhile and it begged me to wonder am I healed? This year I’ve focused on healing. I declared October the month of ‘me’. But what if where I am today is just enough?
It’s day two of my Beach Body/Shake O stuff. The workouts are pretty intense for the 30 minutes they last. The girl in the video will say, “You can do anything for sixty seconds” and often times she’s right.
This world of great love, great life and great loss maybe isn’t what I had planned the day I said ‘I do’ but every day I’m learning contentment.
Even after all this time,
the sun never says to the earth,
‘You owe me.’
Look what happens with a love like that.
It lights the whole sky.
-Hafiz
Thinking of Sam 