One Month

Trite but true…it is hard to believe it has been one month since we held our beloved David in our arms. It seems a lifetime ago, and yet just yesterday. Some days it is hard to believe it happened at all. Maybe it was all a bittersweet dream, that little life I carried for 9+ months, the baby boy we loved, knowing we would never get to keep him in this temporal world. But it was real. David is real and precious and held and known and loved--by me, his mama always--and by all our dear family and by our Father now.

My heart aches for heaven. How it will be when I see David again, I don’t know. I wonder sometimes, will I see David the way I see my children now? For example, when I look at Annie I see her as the tiny baby who taught me to be a mother, and the hesitant toddler, and the stubborn preschooler, and the determined little girl she is now. Maybe when I see David again, it will be something like that? I don’t really need to know. The promise that I will see David again is enough. If our Lord has given us such beauties and wonders and pleasures in this earthly life, and they are only poor imitations of the true thing, the real thing, the perfect thing—what wonders must await us in the abundant life of heaven.

Everyone keeps asking us how we are doing. I don’t really know how to answer that. Usually I just say we are okay. And we are. We are alive, we are well-fed, we have many happy moments each day. We have buried our baby, our hearts hurt, our arms are empty. In the last month, we’ve had a plumber out five times to fix a clogged drain (I think we finally found the right fix). He worked on the shower drain while the Gent and I sat in the living room with our pastor and planned David’s funeral. The dryer died and we had to buy a new one. The exterminator has been handling a mouse problem in our kitchen. EEEEEEEWW. We have exciting plans for building our new house. We sleep through the night because there is no newborn to wake us up. That’s how we are. The grief is not debilitating, our children need us, we have work to do. In some ways we have been grieving since almost the beginning of David’s pregnancy. His diagnosis in the early weeks when we were still very worried about a miscarriage tempered our expectations all along. But it still hurts and it is still hard and his loss is very real and it will always be there.

Our children are stairsteps, all about two years apart. Nora is two and a half and there is no baby after her in our family pictures. David will always be the missing stairstep, his presence hovering around the edges of the family pictures. Unknowing strangers say hurtful things, saying my family is full or where’s the next one or some other seemingly innocuous remark. I want to tell them there is another little boy, but he’s not here, I didn’t get the chance to mother him fully. My family is not full and I have more energy to spare and more love to give but he’s not here.

Some days I wish we still wore mourning clothes and I didn’t have to keep biting my tongue or giving explanations that just making everyone sad. I don’t want to have to tell the checkout lady at the grocery store that I’m not pregnant, I’m postpartum but I don’t have a baby to show for it. I don’t want to have to make the dental hygienist feel awkward because she assumed I was expecting when Jacob told her he had a baby brother but there was no baby with us that she could see. Thank goodness I should be cleared to exercise next week and I can get back in shape. I feel pressured to do it quickly, so I can avoid these conversations. But I’ll never forget I had a baby, that I carried him and birthed him and loved him. That he changed my heart as all of my children have done in some way or another.

I was out shopping recently and I found this two-inch square cube. It sits on my desk now. These words are etched on it: “Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good. Psalm 107:1.” And He is. So I give thanks.