A Modern Day Love Story

The Love Story

Falling in love with Jeremiah was swift and effortless, an uncontrollable undertoe challenging me to blindly accept, to live regardless of past or future, to exist in the moment. True love will do that. Love nearly-at-first sight will do that.

Consequently, every Friday night in the infancy of our relationship I packed my overnight bag and loaded it in my red Ford Escort. Leaving Cape Cod I evaporated a four and half hour drive singing love songs at the top of my lungs. Each week I arrived in Ludlow, cursing at traffic to move faster, as my body filled with bubbling anticipation knowing in the next moments, I would see him.

After one particularly infuriating trip concluding with my frustration at being forced to follow an “I go five miles an hour under the speed limit” eighteen wheeler for the last 10 miles, I finally pulled into the driveway of Jeremiah’s apartment. When I saw him, I gasped. It was a warm late summer evening and the sun, perfectly angled, lit him up. He stood, his back to me, in the center of the driveway. He was wearing chaps, a Carr hart shirt and holding a chainsaw upright towards the sky. He gripped it, one handed with such ease it looked like he could have reached out, chopped down a tree and returned the saw to its vertical position without noticing.

My heart all but stopped. I knew, in that moment, he was my future. He was. He is.

The Modern Twist... First Comes Love, Then Comes Baby, Then Comes Limo for The Wedding Party

I was pregnant at the wedding. This, in-and-of-itself did not make the story, not for me anyway. The purity of our connection told me it was inconsequential, nothing more than a double-arrowed reverse symbol in the society based taunting rhyme. This is not to say Society held it's tongue, but it's words were lost on me. It's whispers, stares, and halted conversations could not penetrate the shield forged by blinding love. I was overjoyed. No one had the power to dampen my bliss.

And It All Came Crashing Down...

I would be lying if I said the words never penetrated. They did, occasionally, and yet I felt no motivation to defend our love, our baby to those who judged.

And then - she died. And then - I died. And, I thought there was a real possiblity that the couple who just knew they were mean to be together might die a slow death too.

Today is our anniversary. Nine years ago today we vowed to love each other 'for better or worse'. Worse made a good show. We shared a long smiling glance at the priest's words, 'accept children that God chooses to bless you with', knowing we already had. May 6, 2000 was the happiest day of my life filled with laughter, love, smiles, and a performance on the dance floor I can say with assurance will never be repeated.

We made it. It wasn't easy. I love him more than I ever have, in a deeper, soul-comprehending, connected-by-loss kind of way that (pray God) most couples never have to work for.

And it is work. And it always will be. And it is worth it because the driveway may be longer, the Car harts might be trendier, and the chainsaw might be newer - but when the sun hits him just right at the end of a long day I still see that man. And my heart nearly stops. And I know he is still my future.

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.