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...

Books for the Grieving

We received books on grief from lots of different people who have walked through different types of grief, loss, or suffering. I wanted to share the ones I have read (some I finished, some I did not) and which I love. And hopefully in sharing these, if you are grieving the loss of a child or know someone who is, here is a resource for you. A Grief Observed by CS Lewis - a book for all seasons of grief, a book that I will probably return to again and again. Holding onto Hope by Nancy Guthrie - this book spoke directly to my heart because it’s about child loss. And it walks through the story of Job. I could probably read this every 6 months and it would speak to my heart in a new way each time. Lament for a Son by Nicholas Wolterstorff - its short and concise, a love letter in some moments and a stream of thoughts on death and grief after the author's adult son dies hiking/climbing. We actually read this in Uganda for an Apprenticeship assignment and I rer...

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