Day 3 - Remembering

There is no right or wrong way to remember the baby or child you no longer get to hold or spoil or soothe or snuggle. There is no right or wrong way to grieve either. The best advice I was given was “everything is optional except breathing.” That amount of freedom I have needed to remember - if that means I can’t go to a baby shower, I have the freedom to not go. Or to step out of church during an infant baptism, I have the freedom to do that.

A wonderful podcast called The Joyful Mourning talks about milestones (#125 I think) and celebrating them (or not) - go give it a listen if you desire.

Tonight we chose to celebrate the week of Jacks birth with a date night. A bunch of friend gifted us a generous gift card to a local restaurant last year on Jacks first birthday so we used that finally and celebrated Jack.

Milestones are weird for me. Some parts of Jack’s story I am so proud of and others make me cringe that we (him and us) had to experience that. I am realizing the months of July and August are hard for me and probably will always be that way. A friend who lost her son last year reminded me that we will never “move on” from this, we just move forward. Each day holds a memory of 2 years ago we were doing this _____. Having the freedom to remember, honor, celebrate and grieve is so important and I have to remind myself of that often.

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Day 32 - How grief changed me

I obviously missed quite a few days - I took about 2 weeks off - turns out blogging about heavy stuff is draining and I probably bit off more than I could chew by aiming to do 35 posts. I have been reflecting on how grief has changed me over the last two years. In many ways, I am not the same person I was when 2021 began. Grief has changed my thought life, my friendships, my work. First - My world got tiny. I often felt myself looking inward (at my usually crappy situation) and feeling a lot of pity, sadness, anger and occasional shame. In those seasons, it’s so hard for me to be an engaged friend. Essentially grief has made me selfish. When you are going through so much stuff, you don’t have capacity to extend yourself to be there for your people. There’s nothing wrong with that - that’s the reality of grief: other people are checking on you for a long time - for good reason. But that’s hard for me- I wasn’t built to be needy, to mope or even be able to answer “...

Day 19 - Joy in the In Between

That phrase makes me roll my eyes sometimes. Joy in the in between. It feels like a quick way to brush off the troubles you are living amidst and force yourself to just "be happy" instead. But, I think I am missing some of the sentiment of the phrase when I let my jaded heart get in the way. When I look back at pictures from the days between Jack's second surgery and when his soul left this earth, I do see joy. I see the faces of my family members who came to see him for the first time. Like my grandparents meeting their first great grandchild. My friends coming to swoon over him even with all of his tubes and unable to hold him. I see photos of us with Jack, holding his hand, enjoying every moment we had with him knowing it was a gift, a miracle. There was pain and sorrow during those days, of course. But essentially joy in the in between is life. We are living right now in the "not yet." We live among pain and sorrow daily (often not as grave in severity...

Day 17 - Joy

Sitting in a hospital is a bit of a time warp. The hours pass slowly some days and other days they fly by. We had a lot of visitors which passed time quickly but only one could come in at a time (COVID rules) and one of us had to leave because only two people could be at the bedside at a time. The rules had actually loosened up about 3 weeks before Jack was born and they tightened back up again at the end of August. The timing was a sweet gift from God. After Jack’s second surgery we did a lot of sitting and waiting. We waited to see if his kidneys would start working again. We waited as the dialysis machine slowly pulled excess fluid out of his body. We waited to see if his heart function would improve after they repaired his arch again. It is an agonizing type of waiting. We were helpless to change the situation. We waited for miracles. We searched for any tiny sign of improvement each day. We eventually were told that Jack’s heart may not ever pump on its own ...

Shickel Family

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