One thing I think the people around me don't realize is that I have four days of peak sorrow in my year - four days of remembering and crying and trying to reconcile my heart.
When you have a dead baby, you mourn the death date and the estimated due date. It isn't even something I do consciously. I'll notice that I have the blues, that my hormones are more hormonal and I want to sleep more and eat less. Then I realize - a due or death date is looming.
After a fairly emotional weekend of internal back-and-forth, I realized that Thursday is Drew's death date. There it is - on my the paper calendar and the ticking calendar of my heart - October 24 - the day I said goodbye to John's rainbow brother.
See, in our house, we "celebrate" the boys' birthdays with Emily. We go to the cemetery and release balloons or plant flowers or bring little toys to the headstone. My husband and I cry a little bit and we lay in the grass and look at the sky and just be sorrowful on a day that should have been happy.
But I'm sort of on my own with death days. I don't bring them up to Emily because we want her to celebrate her brothers. I don't mention it to my husband because this pain is the kind of pain I want to keep to myself. I don't want to have to explain it to someone because I really can't put it into words. It just hurts and that's all anyone needs to know. It's my hurt and I just want to hold it and let it be a real feeling for awhile.
So I know tonight and tomorrow and Thursday and the weekend and even the week after will be hard and I know that this will happen to me four times a year, every year, for the rest of my life.
That's what happens when you carry babies in your heart instead of your arms.
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