....my soul was cored out, like i was a human apple......
here is the speech i read at the first annual candlelighting ceremony at your hospital....i was such a proud momma :*)
Two of the greatest mysteries of all are birth and death….for us here today, those mortal adventures have happened all at once…..to our children. Since grieving is a form of love, and we are parents, the grief is bottomless, shapeless, and timeless.
His name is Oscar Solo, and he was born upstairs, in room 6, sleeping at 9 months….he is permanently 7.5 pounds, 22 inches of lifeless perfection, and he is my son.
The silence was thick, and the terror was crushing, but, the love in that room, that day was intense. Fate forced us to live his entire lifetime with him in just 7 hours…..his hand, holding mine, taking in every hypnotic smell from him. Tranced in horror and love, I said goodbye to his body, and to my partial spirit, and left these hospital doors clutching on to a box of Kleenex, instead of my boy.
I am now 3 and a half years into my grief journey, and only now, at this distance, can I begin to understand the trauma I was hit with that day. The loss of someone very unreplaceable, unrepeatable and uncomparable. Someone I love and miss with all my might….a son, and a brother…I mourn him, and the families he would have started on his own….I mourn that he is parentless, that he never tasted his breast milk that came in for 21 months after….that I never got brush silly curls out of his eyes, watch him play soccer with his dad and brothers, or read him “Goodnight Moon” before bed. I don’t know if he is left handed like his brother, or right handed like his sister……all of these “don’t knows” engulfed me, and spit me out into a shoreless sea……
Babyloss is painfully isolating…..we are still proud parents, regardless, and there is nowhere to go, nowhere to share the beautiful memories of our pregnancies, or to relive the labour, or to describe the soul-stirring of having them placed in our arms for the first and last time. Friends and family disappear in all awkwardness…. afraid to talk about it, to remind us….. but, truth is, they are never, not for a single instance forgotten……always swirling around in our minds, patiently waiting to hear mention of their name….yes, we will cry…love and pain is the chemistry of tears. Allow us that, allow us the time to express the gapping hole running right through us….we cannot rush through the grief, cannot go around the pain…..the work is hard, physical, and exhausting. We must go through the pain, into the eye of it, to find, again, our own private connection with that little womb-dancer…and to work on the beliefs that we will find out why this has happened to us, and to make some sense of why they were given and taken…… and, above all, that they will fit perfectly back into our arms again.
We are all parents….the trick is to work out how to parent the sky babies from such a distance, but it can, has, and will be done….i wish you all strength, peace, and grounding focus….i mourn for your every loss, very deeply, and wish you friendship in this horrific time….and I thank you for all the times you have shared your child with me, the stories, and photos. Remember I am grateful if you’ve allowed me to share Oscar with you…a kind word or compliment of him is never forgotten. Please find ways to continue survival of this ultimate loss, but, never feel you are alone…..and its okay to cry. Fino cielo, Oscar.
