Surfacing

I’m in a funk.  and it’s deep.  I feel my tears begin to surface at the slightest thought of James and Jake.  I want to lay down and cry when I realize how close I would be to their due dates right now.  I would be thirty weeks pregnant with my identical twin boys.  I should be pregnant with my identical twin boys.

Today started out very positive.  I sang to my kids and danced funny for them, I worked, I laughed.

And then we heard a certain song, a song that someday, I’ll share with you.  A song that makes me cry.  Every single time I hear it.  I heard that song today, on my iPod and changed it half way through, because it was just too much.  That song hasn’t left my head since.

Because of that song, I believe, it surfaced.  Grief surfaced.  Pain surfaced.  Sadness.  Loneliness.  I had this desire to sit down and tell someone every detail of their births or deaths.  Honestly, I don’t know what to call it.  Doesn’t birth mean life?  We never saw birth certificates, only death certificates.  I usually just say "when I delivered James and Jake."  But I don’t really say it too much because I don’t talk about them too much anymore.

But I want to.

I am so sick of their deaths.  I am so sick of them being gone.  I am so sick of thinking of the moment when the nurse, my trusted, amazing bereavement nurse, wheeled them away from us for the last time.

I cried.  I cried out "goodbye babies" as she went out the door.   It’s not what I wanted to say, but it’s all I could say without completely losing my mind.  I wanted to say NO PLEASE.  PLEASE NO.  They’re going to be cold without me, we want to hold them for the rest of my life. But we no longer could.  My life with them ceased to exist.  Last October I didn’t even know of a life with them and now I can barely stand the thought of my life without them.  From the moment that nurse started to move away from me, I missed them.

I hate that I had to decide when it was time for James and Jake to leave my hospital room.  I hate it.  There should be a law that if a parent loses their child, that a parent gets so many days or hours before they MUST be wheeled away by a nurse.  Because how can a parent decide when it’s time?  How can a parent call the nurse and say "you can take them now."  Because that’s what I had to do.  And those words, those words you can take them now, will haunt me for the rest of my life.  Because I gave someone permission to take my babies away.  And that is just too much for me to handle.

I’m sitting here, wondering what good this post does.  I’m shaking my head.  The emotional side of me is saying publish, publish.  The logical part, the weaker of the two, says do not.

I am going to publish this, with the hopes that YOU hug your children tighter.  That YOU listen to everything they tell you, whether it’s about crayons or poop or the sun.  Listen.  Promise me that you will not take for granted the love that surrounds you.  Please, feel it.  Roll around in it.  Realize it’s there.  Live it.

If you are reading this and you have suffered a loss like mine, or lost a child, I am so sorry.  I am so very, very sorry.