Reflection
I'm spent. Four plus years of this death, of this fight to survive and dare to thrive in the aftermath. What remains is the natural human wish that it were different. Acceptance is a myth, integration is my hope. Still struggling to become the mother Caitlin deserved, but I sense others don't like who I'm becoming. Still judging the decisions I make and silently condemning my attempts to expose an open heart and articulate a reasoned mind. It's isolating and lonely being the mother of a dead child, with lessons learned only from experiencing the beginning and end of parenting within one's own life span. I don't recommend this path to insight. Ah, I wish I could have folded her into myself, and kept her there forever, and protected her from her life of tubes and saved her from death. I'm spent.
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ReplyDeleteThe photo is lovely. So much love.
ReplyDeleteIt is hard and exhausting. I was at my lowest low this summer ... angry, bitter, tired and depressed. I was done. Those that are not without their child they so dearly love and desperately miss have no idea how exhausting it is to live live everyday with such grief. Sure, there are days, maybe even weeks that seem as if grief and longing have blended into our lives smoothly, but then out of no where it creeps again, and the weight begins to take it's toll. The missing is so much. The longing. Over and over it goes. Remembering your little Caitlin with you.
((((hugs))))
(reposting as my first attempt had too many typos)
ReplyDeleteSuch a beautiful photograph, so suffused with love. I'm so sorry, it is exhausting to try and make sense of any of this. I think you're right, it is an impossibility to accept and live truly at peace with this loss? Integration seems a more realistic goal.
And those last sentences have just made me sob. I wish it were possible, I wish that we could have kept our daughters safe, That image of you folding Caitlin into yourself, so tender and painful and aching, like a bruise. I wish that things could have gone differently. I don't think that I will ever stop wishing for that, I'm only human. And those lessons are unusual ones, those taught by a birth and death that follow hard upon one another and out of sequence, children who die before their parents. Those lessons are ones that engrave you so deeply with something . . . mysterious and painful and unsharable almost? If that makes any sense at all? I am always left feeling that I've seen something I shouldn't have, something that I cannot speak of. And yet it is something central to my life?
Love to you and remembering your beautiful daughter, Caitlin xo
Remembering your sweet Caitlin, and abiding with you.
ReplyDeleteI can tell just by reading your blog that you have infinite love for your daughter and that you are the most loving mom possible to her.
Hugs to you.
This photo is so beautiful - the love that radiates from you is palpable. I wish so much that love were enough to keep our babies safe. I wish you could have folded her into yourself, too.
ReplyDeleteSo much of this grief journey is like a bad Beckett play - "I can't go on. I'll go on." Thinking of you and your Caitlin, and hoping you find a bit of ease or rest in the midst of the aftermath.
I have been thinking of you and Caitlin and especially this picture and all the love it breathes since I read this yesterday. I too wish it were different, for you, for me, for so many of us. You say others don't seem to like who you are becoming. Do you?
ReplyDeleteThinking of you, four years out.
oh so much agony. I know it too. You are not alone and your voice is so necessary. Please don't stop sharing, even when it seems to not matter. It does.
ReplyDeleteHugs sweet mama. Caitlin lives inside you still.
Thanks Amy, Catherine, Lavendar Luz, Sara and Karen. Thank you. You are holding me up.
ReplyDeleteCaitlin is so beautiful, so precious. xo
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