Nothing Has Changed

September 12^th was a terrible day. Actually, the eighteen days of August 26^th – September 12^th were rather awful. I’m beginning to understand that it never really gets easier… you just get farther away from the pain. Time, heartless, cold time takes you away from the moment of despair. Babies are born, things change, life gets busy again. You don’t spend your days under the covers weeping. In the midst of life, there are triggers and you feel the wave of sorrow about to bowl you over and you make a quick detour to avert is because you just can’t right now. Because Kadon needs his bum changed, he needs kisses and hugs, he needs attention… he needs me.

But there are times, times when he doesn’t need me at the moment. And the last two years are swept away as if they never happened and I find myself exactly where I was the day she died. I remember holding her, skin-to-skin, against my heart. I remember them taking the tube out of her mouth. I remember the way it felt to have my daughter die in my arms.

When time steps out of the way and I truly relive her, when I relive her birth, her first bath, her cuddles, her story-times, her sickness, her CPR, her death, I realize something. The only way I can talk stoically about her, how I can calmly inform well-meaning strangers Kadon is not my first child, how I can speak of the tragedy in the same tone of voice as the weather is because time has created a buffer. I am no longer there. I am not in the moment. But sometimes I am. And nothing has changed.

Fear. Abandonment. Betrayal. Pain. Sorrow. Anger. Loss. It’s all there. It’s just not all-consuming all the time.

My hope is in Heaven. Where she is. When I truly understand how fleeting our time on earth is. When all things are made new. When tears are wiped away. When time ceases to exist. When true healing takes place, not the make-do band-aid of healing we experience here on earth when a child is taken.