This will be the tenth Mother’s Day since Dominic ran ahead to Heaven.
Every year has been different because families continue to grow and change and the world turns and life marches on.
Every year presents unique challenges and particular paths that must be navigated anew. It’s always an emotional roller coaster.
Read the rest here: Holidays Can Be Hard-What To Do About Mother’s Day
I shared this for the first time six years ago.
Before my mother’s illness and death, before the frighteningly early arrival of our little Captain and the less-frightening and less early arrival of his brother, LT, before an overseas deployment, a destructive hurricane, Covid19, and too many other stressful events to list.
I have watched my kids meet every challenge-sometimes with grace, sometimes with grit, sometimes with both.
They are different people than they would have been if Dominic still walked beside us. They know things their peers can’t even guess.
We all lost so much when we lost Dom. But we still have each other.
And that’s a treasure.❤
I never thought it possible to love you more than I already did.
But I do.
Your brother’s untimely departure has opened my heart in a whole new way to the glory that is your presence. It has made me drink you in like water in the desert.
Read the rest here: A Letter To My Living Children*
Child loss is also often sibling loss.
In addition to their own heartache, bereaved parents carry the heartache of their surviving children.
The family everyone once knew is now a family no one recognizes. Hurting hearts huddle together-or run and hide-and it is so, so hard to find a way to talk about that pain.
Read the rest here: Grief is a Family Affair
I have always loved candles. Something in the flickering light speaks to my heart.
It’s one of my favorite parts of early evenings-watching the candles I light on every flat surface cast a soft glow and chase the darkness.
Even a small light offers hope.
Read the rest here: Remembering the Missing: Four Candles
I’ve had plenty of beautiful Christmases.
I’ve had more than a decade of more somber ones.
But when our pastor recently asked, “What was the best Christmas gift you ever received?” I didn’t have to think hard at all.
It was my daughter, Fiona.
She wasn’t born ON Christmas but a week before-today is her birthday-and I was oh, so glad to finally hold that tiny bundle in my arms instead of in my belly.
My first successful pregnancy (I’d miscarried a year before) was a long, hard and difficult one. I never achieved that “glow” so many women enjoy while hormones guaranteeing baby’s health and safety surged through my system.
Instead I was desperately ill for the first four months as I wrapped up my college degree. (In hindsight, taking biology at six in the morning was a bad choice.) I spent many of those days in close communion with the toilet or a bowl when I couldn’t muster the energy to get to the bathroom.
I had a few short golden weeks before my body revolted once again and I developed a serious case of preeclampsia. Now my doctor visits were weekly and included fetal monitoring.
Back then there were few interventions for this condition so it was wait and see, wait and see all the while I counted days and weeks until I could reach the magic “thirty-four week” mark of likely viability.
Thankfully, we made it!
But then that little Miss decided to assert her personality and refuse to make an entrance.
So…finally…I was scheduled to deliver ten full days after her due date of December 8th.
It was a long day of pitocin, contractions, no progress and a swift trip to the OR for what ended up being an emergency C-section. Drama all the way!
She was here, safe and sound, in my arms at last.
There are lots of things I don’t remember in detail about that day or even the week that followed but I remember this: I knew in my bones that life would never be the same. This precious child made me a mama and my heart would forever be wrapped around hers.
I’m so very thankful I had the blessing of three more little ones after that.
I’m grateful for the lives they’ve lived and the ones they are living now.
I miss my third-born, Dominic. His birth story is woven just as firmly into the fabric of my being as Fiona’s and that of her other brothers.
I can’t pick out his threads without unraveling the whole cloth.
And I don’t want to.
I celebrate today the gift of motherhood and the gift of children.
Even when one of them leaves too soon.
Love is always costly, but love is always worth the price.
I was utterly amazed at the questions people plied me with not long after Dominic’s accident.
They ranged from digging for details about what happened (when we ourselves were still unsure) to ridiculous requests for when I’d be returning to my previous responsibilities in a local ministry.
Since then, many of my bereaved parent friends have shared even more questions that have been lobbed at them across tables, across rooms and in the grocery store.
Recently there was a post in our group that generated so many excellent answers to these kinds of questions, I asked permission to reprint them here (without names, of course!).
So here they are, good answers to hard (or inappropriate or just plain ridiculous) questions:
Read the rest here: Good Answers to Hard (Insensitive,Inappropriate) Questions
I first shared this a few years ago when I really thought I should have reached a place in my grief journey where holidays weren’t as difficult as they were at first.
But what I realized then and what has been confirmed since is that every year has new and unique situations that make Christmas a fresh challenge each time.
❤ Melanie
As the ninth Christmas without Dominic rapidly approaches, I am pondering the question: “Why, oh why, is Christmas so hard?”
I think I’ve figured out at least a few reasons why.
Read the rest here: Why, Oh Why, is Christmas So Hard???
People say, “I can’t imagine.“
But then they do.
They think that missing a dead child is like missing your kid at college or on the mission field but harder and longer.
That’s not it at all.
Read the rest here: What Grieving Parents Want Others to Know
Dominic left us in April, 2014.
At the time all I could manage (barely!) was the twenty-four hours of each long, lonely and pain-wracked day.
After seven-plus years I’ve learned to look ahead, plan ahead and forge ahead to birthdays, holidays, special days and not-so-special days.
But it takes a great deal of effort and often uncomfortable conversations because no matter how long it’s been, I’m still dragging loss and its after affects behind me.
I wrote this in 2016 when I was desperate to communicate how hard it is to try to marry joy and sorrow, celebration and commemoration, light, love, life and darkness, grief and death.
It remains (I think) my most useful post: Grief and Holidays: What the Bereaved Need From Friends and Family
When I was a little girl I never thought about how the holidays impacted the adults around me. I figured it was all about ME. Or at most, me plus my brother and Santa Claus.
I was blissfully unaware of budgets and baggage.
Now I know better.
The holidays require us to wrap more than presents. They force us to wrap all the pain and expectation and hope and heartache in a giant package and serve it up hot and ripe for dissension and disappointment.
It’s relatively easy to figure out what to put under the tree (or give for the nights of Hanukkah or Kwanzaa). It’s much harder to figure out what to bring to the dinner table or the family gathering or the we’re-doing-something-different-this-year NON-gathering.
I’ve written a lot about the holidays in previous years and I will be sharing those posts again because there is always someone who hasn’t read them or who is just now in need of them. But I wanted to add something to the canon this year-on the ninth set of holidays with one child in Heaven.
It’s not easier just because I’ve had practice.
We have yet to settle into a system that makes space for all the feelings and changes that time brings to lives and loves and hearts and homes.
I’m just as jealous TODAY of whole families as I was the first Christmas without Dominic. I’m just as likely to sit for hours wondering what, exactly, I should cart down from the attic, what I should set up in the living room, how I should honor him without making him a “saint” and when tears are appropriate or distracting and indulgent.
I don’t want to discourage anyone.
I have developed many more coping skills and ways to make it through the season than I had that first awful Christmas when every song, every memory, every EVERYTHING stung like driving snow on frozen faces.
I’m just being honest which is the first and most important commitment I made when I started sharing in this space. And I don’t want any heart who still struggles to think he or she is unusual or defective or weak or “less than” the hearts that declare unmitigated victory over grief and sorrow.
Life is life.
It’s not less treacherous because I’ve developed bigger emotional biceps as a result of child loss.
There is, in fact, a greater gap between what I expect from myself and what I find I’m able to give.
But I keep trying.
I’ll buy the presents, deck the halls, make the meals and cherish every moment I’m with the ones I love.
Because I’m oh, so aware that this Christmas may be the LAST Christmas.
A beautiful and terrible burden to bear.
thelifeididntchoose 