Then and Now

As I was canning tomatoes yesterday, it struck me (hard) that time is really a paradox. Emma's birthday is one week away, a mere seven days, and I was doing the mundane task of canning tomatoes and actually enjoying myself!

In the raw stages of our grief just after losing a child we are shred, unable to participate in any of the world's activities, important or mundane. We don't fit in and when we try we seem to lose layer after layer of ourselves to the effort. Emma's first birthday was like a time portal, I was shot back to the actual event, and worse to the preceeding day and forced to live each stage of the finding out, denial, labor, delivery, saying goodbye, burying her ..etc all over again.

The second, third and fourth years weren't much better. Truly, you didn't want to be near me in the last part of August or the first two weeks of September because there was no telling what would trigger me causing full on emotional breakdown whereever I happened to be.

But here I am, eight years later, listening to inspirational music on my mp3 player and preserving food for the upcoming winter with Emma's anniversary looming, but I am ok. I will not tell you that I don't see those images on a daily basis. I do. I see them because it is September but also because I am writing a book about Emma, our bond, our story and the powerful truths I learned to get to this healing point. To do this I have to recall these scenes in great detail. So yes, I do see them, but they don't hold the same power over me that that used to. In fact, I have taken control of them. I use them to remember her face and the feel of her body pressed against mine as we cuddled together after delivery. I use them to smile when Bear (my five year old) weeds Emma's burning bush and talks to her about our life here, just like I did all those years ago. I guess there was no need, she is still here.

This, it seems, is a big year. The buzz around the world... 8 is a powerful number. I don't know about the world, but it appears that eight years is a very powerful number for my grieving process. Wherever you are in your process, not measured in years, but in your heart and in your "trigger threshold", God bless you and may you continue to walk, one step at a heartbreaking time, down your grieving road toward celebration.