Almost 24 hours Away

What an interesting week! I found myself in a crazy world of anxiety. First, I had a night where I spent two hours crying and then two hours awake unable to go to sleep until 2am. Next came a day where I cleaned my home from sun up to sun down, collapsing in bed at 11pm. You would think my home looked put together after that, but still didn’t. Then came the next day where I was so tired that all I could do was nap and eat junk food ALL day! I have never eating so much junk in my life! But even without hunger my mouth needed something to work on. I am the kind of person that will either over work myself or completely indulge on sleeping my troubles away. My need to work and clean is not based on “keeping myself busy” as if I stayed still i would think nonstop on my pain. Guess what? Rather I am busy or if I allow myself to have a day of nothingness, I still carry and deal with the pain inside. Being busy is just a way to help the current day pass faster, it’s a way to help the week pass a little faster… I am almost 24 hours away from the day I brought my daughter into my arms. I am close to the time I started laboring to bring her out. Today is the day my body did the most amazing work to bring a child to me. No wonder that this week has been nothing but anxiety!

I have dreaded coming a full circle with the day that forever changed my life. The concept of a year has changed and feels like it was yesterday. I feel brain damaged in the fact that a year is a long time, yet it poured down on us like sand running through our fingers. Even if I get minutes without thinking about it, my body has a way of reminding me, simply living life today reminds me. It can be the sun shining a certain way, or the sunset, or it may be a visit to the doctor to get contacts, it may be which side of the bed I lay at night, or even waking up in the middle of the night to familiar sounds of my husband sleeping. Many times I want to shake it off, but even if I try to run away from it, somehow it finds a way to find me. I have not ignored how I felt all year long. I have faced my pain and have been dealing with it. Yet why is it that I am so scared of tomorrow?  I am so scared of waking up tonight in the middle of the night. I don’t want to be alone at night, I don’t want to think about that night and all that should have been. I have done that all year long! I wish I could just sleep all day Friday, how do you make it each year through such a thing, year after year? It’s just horrible! I hope one day I can see her as a gift not a loss. When I am asked so where do you go from here? My answer is I don’t know! I wish I could come up with this beautiful thing to say and give myself and others this “story” of moving forward with life. Some choices have been made for us. I will soon share those, but for now all I have to say is getting through the next few days and November 1^st will be a road I wish I did not have to take. If I could wake up days from now I would sign up for it.

My original plan was to sleep in the morning and for us to scape town tomorrow afternoon for a few days.  I wanted to leave all behind, yet as if I can scape my own heart!? Thank goodness that the weather has changed! That it’s rainy and cloudy. Nothing like the days a year ago. The beautiful magic of a sunny breezy fall day came to a sudden end that day! All I can say is that in my brokenness I have realized how much more of Jesus I need each day. My daily existence is dependent on His ability to give me grace and strength to make through one more day at a time. I really thought that I knew how much I needed Him to make through life. This past year brought knowledge and some living to a place I call - desperate living dependent on Him. Every day I wake up and I say out of desperation, “Jesus I can’t make it through today”, “I don’t have it what it takes”, “I am so weak and hurting”… Yet in the end of each day I realize that by His grace I have made through one more day. It’s not based on what I know, not based on what I do, it’s not based in who I am; I have made it because there is a power in Him I can’t explain that fills me and works in me and gives me what it takes to make it through one more day. I have been thirsty and hungry for Him, I have been desperate for Him, I have been broken and He has come to meet me in my place of despair. He is power, He is strength, He is the air I breathe, He sustains me and because of Him I have made it this far! Thank you Jesus for being so real to me, I have needed you more than ever before in my life and you have been walking with me along the way. Thank you that You are who You say you are! You are real in my life and I am so thankful to be yours!

Sharing in the sufferings of another mother's loss

I wrote this on Good Friday, Easter Weekend. I felt in so much sorrow knowing what happened that day as Mary lost her son, as Jesus was crucified. The mom of loss heart of mine so connected with hers, I could not help but grieve intensely with her in her precious loss…  I have written many pieces from the beginning, but just now I feel like maybe I can share my journey with people I don’t know. So my blog will have to start with what is going on now and then go back words for a while. So as I get closer to the day our child died this is what I want to share.

When an angel appeared to her and called her blessed one, he revealed to her that she was going to carry the promised Messiah. Mary in awe said, “let it be done to me according to your will”.  I can imagine the thoughts that she might have had about the little baby in her arms, I can imagine her watching him during his toddler years, as he grew into a 6 year old child and beyond… The movie Passion of the Christ has an amazing scene of Mary working on the outside of her home and Jesus playing when suddenly he gets hurt. She runs to him and embrace him like any of us moms would. I think of her as a mom that loved her child and perhaps never imagined the pain she would suffer one day to watch her son die, on a cross, right in front of her.  After giving birth and losing my own child, Mary quickly came to my mind, she knew she was carrying the son of God in her womb, she knew the little baby in her arms was the promised One, the Messiah  that had been promised in the beginning of times to redeem us and restore us. I can’t fathom the thoughts of joy and love mixed with the apprehension of what the future might hold for him. Did she fully understand what was to come? As he grew older did she get more “protective” of him? Did she ever look into her baby’s eyes knowing in her heart that sometime in his future he would die? Who is the parent that wants to think about that? Yet if she knew the promise made in scripture, if she understood who he really was, then she must have known he would indeed fulfill the promise… Did she ever realize that with the joy of nurturing him in the womb and carrying for him as he grew up, she would also experience great pain in watching her child die?

Like many moms all around me, we all know the same pain she experienced, the one of losing a child. Some die in very young age, some children live a long life, some suffer so much and some die before they get the chance of taking their very first breath! No mom wants to think about bringing her child into the world to die. We perceive birth as the beginning of life on earth. When in reality birth is a transition to life outside the womb, the baby has already been living on earth through the womb for the past 9 months. Birth is just the time when that life can transition to the outside and takes a breath on her own for the first time.  The other day I caught myself saying this to my husband, I could not believe that it came out of my own mouth, I said: “we want to believe that Isabella’s birth was the beginning of her life, the reality is she had been alive with us for the past 9 months, she had been on planet earth in my womb for a while, she was part of our family already.  So, Isabella just got to skip all this stuff out here on earth and went straight for the home run”.  Sometimes we forget that our lives here is a passage, that while we live here a short while we were not made for this world, our souls were made for eternity, God created us for a relationship with Him that goes beyond our earthly bodies. Life here is a passage that prepare us to what’s to come, there is life after death.  Life comes with a 100% guarantee, it’s the fact that all of us will die one day. I have thought so much about the moms that lose their children to cruel violent deaths, how horrible and heart breaking that is! I imagined the aching of Mary’s heart on that Friday when her son died on the cross and she was there watching the agony of her son Jesus suffering. I have cried with countless moms over the death of their beloved babies, I have cried countless tears with moms I have come to know online over the death of their children; we that lost children hold each one of these children close to our hearts. We keep their moms close to our hearts as well, we hold special dates and holidays close to our hearts and hold those families in thoughts and prayers because it’s so difficult to just live each day after they depart from us! Today is “Good Friday”,  I couldn’t stop thinking about the day Jesus died, how thousands of years later people still talk about him, about his life, about his death; it was the day Mary’s world fell apart! Mary’s child was not forgotten, he will always be talked about, he will always be remembered, His life’s  story will always be carried on by those who have come to know him. Death seems to be an end to life, yet there is life after death. I was sharing with a friend today parts of a book written to help grieving children. Her 5 yr old son was having a hard time understanding how Jesus was raised from the dead, but not his baby brother.  I added some of my own words onto the words of the book.

"God created a plan for us for when we die. When breath moves out of our bodies and our bodies stop working we die here on earth, but the part that lived inside our body-the part that makes us laugh, cry, listen, feel, pray, and think doesn't die-that is our soul. So when a person dies, the body is like an empty house. Nobody lives in there anymore. It's hard to understand that, but it is part of God's plan. It's the end of life here and the beginning of life in heaven. It's like the person has a new birthday in heaven-a new beginning. Just like our birthday here is a very happy day for us, their birthday in heaven is a very happy day too. Our baby is very happy in heaven, he is having fun; heaven is the best place you can think of. How fast does a person's soul go to heaven? Faster than you can clap your hands, faster than you can stomp your feet, faster than you can say your name-that is how fast a person's soul goes to heaven when a person dies. Heaven is not a sad or scary place, it is a place of joy. Yes, God has the power to raise our baby from the dead just like He did Jesus. In fact He promised to do so! We just have to be patient and wait. It might take a long time for that to happen. It did not happen when our baby died like we wanted to, but He will one day. Our baby and all the ones that have gone to Heaven before us, all together will be resurrected just like Jesus did. Their bodies and souls will work together as one again. That is why Easter means so much to us. Resurrection day is a day we look forward to, He is powerful and He will do it, just not yet. For now Heaven is part of His plan for those that have died until the day Jesus comes and God with His power will give our baby a new body and allow us to spend lots of time together in heaven. It's ok for us to talk to God how we wished He could have brought our baby back that day, He understands when we are upset, He knows we don't want someone we love to die. For now we know that God has a plan for life after we die too. We hurt and miss our baby, but we know our baby is safe and happy, and we will see God's power one day, He will do to us what He did to Jesus, He promised that. God doesn't lie, He is a promise keeper". (Some of it i added my words to it, but most came from the book “Someone I Love Died”.

This weekend we will celebrate Easter, it means so much more to me this year! I am so happy that we celebrate it because Easter tells us a story of hope, it gives us a glimpse of what is to come, it is victory over death that we will experience through Christ. Easter is not about going to church, or dressing up, or the meal and family gathering, it’s a day of joy for me! Happy Easter is so HAPPY to me to say now, because He is the first of the first to resurrect to life, in the same way through Him we know that death on earth is not the end. As the song we chose for Isabella’s funeral says “I will rise” when He calls my name! Isabella will rise one day, all the ones that have been stung by death will rise! Although there’s joy in that, our hearts will always hurt too, we will mourn for her and with those who continue to lose their precious children!

In a few weeks we will do a memorial in honor of our daughter. We will have some music, some scripture reading, we will update others on how our family is doing, we will also do a balloon release, share some cupcakes and punch with friends and family. We don’t want to be alone through this time as we hurt and we also want to give people an opportunity for them to share with us how our little one touched their lives. I want to know that my daughter will not be forgotten. Part of me wishes that people 2,000 years from now would still talk about her life like we do about Mary’s son. I know that is not really realistic; but for now, I work so hard to keep her part of our family, to create some kind of memory of her passing through our lives! It’ll mean a lot to have others acknowledge her with us.  I just love hearing when someone shares that her little life left a print in in their heart!

Isabella, the day you came you went from my arms into the arms of Jesus. Jesus was here with us. He received you and Heaven is the home you will ever know. Happy 1^st Birthday in Heaven, Happy Birthday Sweet Baby Girl!