Living without Alex 4-28-06

FRIDAY, APRIL 28, 2006 07:29 PM, CDT
Today was an especially hard day. 3 months old. You would be laughing, learning to roll over, preffering my face to any other, reaching out to play with your toys..... The visions of this that I get in my head are beautiful and so painful at the same time.

Every day, in everything I do I think of you. When I wake up in the morning I feel like I should be doing something and then it hits me....... I should be getting you out of bed and feeding and changing you, excited to start our day together. I remember when the other kids were little, just waking up every morning and being glad that it was finally morning........ now I wake up every morning and feel sad that I have to live yet another day without you.

Today daddy and I were very sad and we opened your box. The box sits on our headboard and seems to only get opened when we are feeling especially sad and you know it only makes us sadder. Everything that was connected to you is in that box:
your footprints from the hospital,

your booties, both the blue baseball ones that the nurses loved so much because they fit on your swollen little feet so well and the jingly horsey ones that were on your feet the day you left us, that still have blood on them from when nurse Kelsa made them messy a couple of days before.

The invitations to your 'birthday party' we had for you the first day

Your hospital bracelet taped to the disk that has your first echocardiogram images on it.

Your lock of hair, crib card, the pacifier the nice nurse at Marshfield gave you. So many things that in a perfect world would hold some sentimental value, but in our world they are our most valuable posessions. The one thing we don't have is your hat. The hat that your nurse searched high and low for because your sweet head was too tiny for the regular baby hats..... yours had to be special. We never got your hat from the hospital.

We miss you so very much. Daddy said to me today that he was scared to have another child because he was afraid that you would think we were trying to replace you. I told him that we all know, you included that no one in the universe could ever replace you.....

I hope you are having fun in heaven. I take comfort in the fact that you will never have to experience the pain that we feel, your new perfect body will always be young and healthy and you will never feel any pain again, only joy basking in God's light. I can't wait until the day that I can be with you again I dream of it a lot when the nights get quiet and I can't sleep. I envision me going to heaven and seeing you and scooping you up in my arms and holding you tight for an eternity.

Sweet bubba, I hope you know how much we loved you in life and how much we will always love you. I hope that all those long days in that hospital bed you felt that. I hope we made the right decisions for you, we made them out of our love. Until we meet again.........
____________________________________________

I'm not sure if I've shared this poem before or not, but it is one that the 'poetry therapist' (which I thought was kind of a hokey profession and she cried more than I did the poor soul) brought and read to me the day before Alex's surgery and it does a good job at explaining things

But not Today
-Brenda Neal

Sometimes
I can let go of the past,
a past locked behind the doors
of painful memories.
But not today.

Sometimes
I can accept the reality
that is me
and the journey headlong
into the unknown.
But not today.
Today change comes hard.
I wear my feelings on my sleeve,
and nothing seems right.

Sometimes
I feel I can
weather anything
tackle anything
do anything
But not today.