Needing the Grief

Okay. As in how I’ve been feeling the last day or so. And I’m both grateful for it and perplexed by it. Sunday and Monday were incredibly hard, but yesterday was pretty manageable. As I headed into this week, I guess I anticipated that my brain would be hijacked right back into every single harrowing moment of those last four days we spent with Hudson, the worst of which I have already written about here on several different occasions. I thought this week would mean reliving all those nightmarish experiences over again. I thought I would spend each day thinking, “At this time last year, Hudson got diagnosed and admitted to the PICU” and “At this time last year, we got the devastating news from the second CT scan.” But somehow, I’ve managed to avoid all that. I’m not purposely doing so. I wasn’t even particularly busy yesterday, which I had been on Monday. I had plenty of downtime during which I could have easily been caught up in the awful sadness that this week represents for us, but somehow I didn’t.

I don’t know if this is just my trusty protective coating of numbness kicking in as we get closer to Friday or what. I certainly do have a bit of a sense of floating outside myself right now given how surreal my entire life seems right now—sitting around worrying myself sick waiting for Jackson to be born, still completely unable to imagine what life is going to be like with him here and Hudson not, floored that we are about to have a newborn in the house again but all by himself—all this while simultaneously trying to plan for how to commemorate the one-year anniversary of Hudson’s death. When we made the decision to keep trying to get pregnant through August, I knew this would be a possibility. When it actually came about that we had a baby due within days of the anniversary, I took a deep breath and just tried to believe that it was supposed to happen that way (although after what happened to Hudson, it is certainly harder than ever to believe that anything is ever really supposed to happen). But now that it is here, it feels completely dreamlike—again, like this must be anyone else’s life but my own.

And then just as I finished writing the above, I went looking for something on the blog, something I’d written back in December. And as I was looking, I came across this instead. I couldn’t help but watch. My god, that child’s shining face. That I will never see again. As soon as the first chord sounded and the first photo appeared, I was sobbing. After I’d just written that I’d been feeling OK. But the truth is, I need to sob. This week, I need the grief just as much as I need respite from it. As I’ve said so many times, the grief and the pain are such a large part of what keeps me connected and close to my beautiful child—as hard as it is, it has become familiar, even comfortable. To be distant from it during this week… well, it just doesn’t make sense to me. I just need it. In a way that I can’t explain.

My dearest, sweetest, most beautiful little girl—I love and miss you so very much, my girl. I am crying for you now.