Preparing

In what has now become a ritual period of sleeplessness in the middle of the night, it occurred to me last night that today is exactly two weeks before Hudson’s second birthday on December 1. Which means it is almost, not quite, but almost, exactly 2 years since Ed and I went had some professional pregnancy photos taken. I was 36.5 weeks pregnant, and Hudson was born 9 days early, so these photos were taken just two weeks before she was born. Three days later, we went to our 37-week OB appointment and learned that I was already 2cm dilated and 70% effaced. We freaked out, given that we had not yet even bought a car seat to bring this baby home in. We spent the next several days on wild shopping sprees, buying all the essentials we did not yet have, crossing things off our list left and right. We got the car seat installed that weekend. We were as prepared as prepared could be.

I’m not sure if we have ever shared these photos beyond a very few close family members and friends—as you can see, they are very intimate and personal. And yet, I felt the need to share them today, because as you can also see, we were already so in love with our child and so obviously in love with one another. Before we ever even bought the rest of the baby gear, we were prepared. Prepared to be parents, prepared for our lives to change forever, prepared to love that baby like we’d never loved anything before, not even each other.

At this same time last year, I was in high gear preparing for Hudson’s 1st birthday party. I’ve always believed that it is so important to really celebrate birthdays. My mom made me feel so very special on every birthday, and I wanted my children to feel that same way, to have one day that is all about them. I’ll write more about Hudson’s birthday party later, but the other day, I was cleaning up some clutter and I found a notepad with my shopping list and to-do list for the party. I had so many different things in the works—a monkey smash cake for Hudson, monkey cupcakes for everyone else, a homemade personalized party hat for Hudson, CDs with Hudson’s favorite songs for everyone to take home as party favors. Two weeks before Hudson’s birthday last year, I was busy. Busy preparing to celebrate the birth of my incredible child, who had changed my life in ways I could never have imagined before she was born, who had made me want to be not just a better mom, but a better person, who had finally made me understand the value of loving myself so that I could better love others.

And now. Now it is two weeks before Hudson’s birthday again and I have no idea what to do. I am not busy preparing anything, but I feel like I should be. How do I prepare to celebrate the birthday of my dear child who has died? I most certainly want to celebrate it, or maybe commemorate is the right word, because frankly, I am in no mood to celebrate—I know many parents do continue to have parties with cake and balloons and all those kinds of things, but that is just not for me. At least not this year. I have had many ideas and thoughts about what to do, but not one of those ideas does any justice to the extraordinary spirit that Hudson was or to the profound impact that she had and continues to have on my life every single day. How could anything? When I have a party to plan, preparing is easy—party planning I know. Party planning gives me lists that I can delight in crossing through. But preparing to honor my precious child’s birthday after she has died is just something I never dreamed I’d have to do. No list will help me here.

I’ve never been so unprepared for anything in my entire life.

Normal

In a world where everything seems anything but, “normal” is a very comforting word to hear. I am far too drained from yesterday’s post to write anything substantial today (and thank you all so very much for all the love and support since), but I’m just driving by to say that I heard from our perinatologist today that the results of the Penguin’s early genetic screening were “well within the normal range.” To be exact, our risks are 1 in 5000 for Down Syndrome and 1 in 10,000 for trisomies 13 and 18. And we hit 13 weeks today. So while I know all too well that there are never any guarantees, our risks of things going wrong keep dropping. Even having been on the worst end of the odds when we lost our precious Hudson, that is still a relief.

Rest in Peace

This post has been a long time coming. I have started it and stopped it in my head a million times. I stop because I get overwhelmed by the sorrow of this particular memory of the hospital. And I think I stop because I am afraid that sharing this memory somehow means closing some door that I am not ready to close. I have no idea why today suddenly seems like the day. I think I just finally feel like I can’t carry it around by myself anymore. This is by no means my worst memory from the hospital—it is just the saddest, and the most poignant, moment of those four days—indeed of my entire life.  (And I say this partly by way of warning so that you can stop reading now if this is not a good time).

The pose you see in this photo was not a customary one for Hudson. All through her days as a young infant, I kept waiting for her to start snuggling with me like this routinely, for her to rest her head on my shoulder for comfort and warmth. But not my girl. She practically came out of the womb holding her head up, and from that point on, she always wanted to know what was going on around her, and that required that she be upright and paying attention. I have no idea what inspired her to rest her head on me in this photo—I know it was taken at Thanksgiving, so maybe the cumulative effects of the long, exciting day (when she took her first tentative steps) and a big meal just got the better of her and she decided to take a rest. I’ve cherished this photo ever since I first saw it, though, because it’s one the few I have of us like this (beyond the first few days of her life). I cherish it even more now, for reasons you will soon understand.

Hudson started feeling bad early in the morning on Mother’s Day. After waking up a few times in the night with a fever, I figured she needed plenty of rest to help her get over whatever bug she was fighting off. She was fussy and whiny, as kids tend to be when they don’t feel well, and insisted on being held most of the day. So when she wouldn’t nap in her crib, I picked her up and brought her out to the glider and let her sleep on my chest, with her head tucked in on my shoulder, just like you see above. It worked like a charm—she napped soundly there off and on throughout the day. The following night and morning, about which I’ve written more times than I care to remember, were even rougher than the first night, and we were up and out the door at 7:30AM Monday morning for our early trip to the pediatrician. After that visit, the doctor sent us down to the lab to get bloodwork and a chest x-ray, where Hudson continued to rest in exactly that same position while we waited to be called for our turn for each procedure. We loaded her back into the car, not surprised that she sacked out in the car seat pretty much immediately. She was such a tired little monkey and had been poked and prodded at all morning after having a really fitful night of sleep. Once I got her back home, I took her straight to her crib to put her down for some more sleep. She rested there for about 10 or 15 minutes and then began to fuss, so I brought her out the glider again, where she spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon sleeping on me, interrupted only a few times by my asking her if she would try some water from her cup, to which she replied with a feeble “No.” She stayed in that position while I called the pediatrician again to ask if I should be concerned that she had not eaten or drunk anything since 7PM the night before, at which point the doctor sent us on to the ER to get fluids, just in case. The entire time at the ER, standing in the triage line, sitting in the waiting room, talking to the triage nurse, she stayed in that same position. In fact, when we finally saw the triage nurse, I made of a point of the fact that she’d been in pretty much the same position all day, hoping it would be a red flag that would get us seen sooner rather than later. It worked. We were finally seen about 2 hours after we got there, and Hudson was admitted with a meningitis diagnosis Monday evening.

Little did I know that I would be unable to hold my girl like that again while she was alive. I said to Ed afterwards that I was so grateful, both for Hudson’s sake, and my own, that she spent her last two days of consciousness snuggling with her mommy, resting in my arms. Because the next three days are a terrible nightmarish blur with too many awful frightening points of clarity, many of which I’ve written about before. Once Hudson was hooked up to an IV and other gadgets, we were unable to hold her in our laps or do much more than just sit by her and hold her hand while she was still conscious. Once she was sedated, and later in a coma, we could lay on the bed beside her. But we couldn’t hold her. The one time we tried, with the nurses’ assistance, to pick her up off the bed so that we could hold her in our arms, the experience was fraught with peril, setting off alarms left and right, bringing four or five nurses in at once to try and fix the line that had been broken somehow in the process. Needless to say, it was only so comforting.

How I longed to hold my sweet girl during those terrible days, to comfort her, to be comforted by holding her close. I didn’t get the chance again until it was time to say our final goodbyes. We had said goodbye once before, earlier that day, not long after our endeavor to hold her, when her system appeared so unstable that we just weren’t sure when it would finally give up. We wanted to be sure that we had said what we needed to say to her and hugged her and kissed her so that we wouldn’t be forced to do that in another nightmare of alarms and rushing around. But then came time for the real goodbye. Her little body had held on, supported by a dozen different machines and medications, for one brain death test on Wednesday night and the repeated test on Thursday night. We had known at least since the middle of the day on Tuesday that the injury to her brain from the infection had been catastrophic. We had known at least since late Tuesday and early Wednesday that she could no longer breathe on her own and that her brain was not even performing a basic function of regulating her temperature. We had known since Wednesday night that her brain showed no signs of any activity and that nothing was likely to change between that first test and the second test that would occur Thursday night. Ed and I have discussed before that in some ways, she “died” several different times during those days—over and over again, we got new information, each piece more cataclysmic and irreversible than the last. Until it was finally time. The doctors had told us that once the second brain death test had been performed, they would be required to declare her dead and to remove all life support not long thereafter. We could have some time with her before they did it, but not a lot.

We had decided that anyone in the family who wanted to could be present when they disconnected everything. By this point, I had bared the rawest parts of my soul to total strangers as I wailed in the waiting rooms and walked zombie-like through the hallways of the PICU, eyes staring at nothing in particular. There was no way to orchestrate these final moments with Hudson “just right”—it just had to be whatever it was.

Once we got word that the final test was over (my dearest Ed somehow managed to be present for the entirety of both tests—he just felt like he needed to see for himself, and we have never really spoken of those moments since then), and after some mix-ups and explanations with the new attending on duty about how everything would actually happen, everyone came back into the room. We asked the nurse to turn off all the monitors. Everyone who wanted to gave Hudson a kiss and then formed a half-circle around the bed, arms around each other (I’m certain in some cases, they were literally holding one another up). Ed and I sat on the bed next to our precious girl and waited as the doctor and the nurse pulled out each tube and disconnected every machine. I remember hearing sniffles around me. I remember sitting there with a half-smile on my face, amazed for the moment that I did not feel the need to cry, and then thinking about how in Steel Magnolias, M’lynn describes this same moment when they disconnected her daughter’s life support, saying, “There was no noise, no tremble, just peace.” And that is what I felt at that moment—somehow, I just felt peace. All I wanted was for them to get all that stuff off of her so that I could hold her.

And that is what I did. As soon as everything was gone, and she was back down to just her diaper, I scooped her up in my arms, cradling her like I had when she was a tiny infant, with her head in the crook of my left elbow, pulling her close to me. I remember thinking how incredible it felt to hold her again, to feel her weight in my arms, to snuggle her close. I hadn’t been able to do that in over three days, the longest time I’d gone since she was born without doing that. Ed and I sat with her in our arms for the longest time, until finally everyone else drifted out of the room and left us alone with her. Still, I didn’t cry.

Until I put her up on my shoulder. I turned her upright and rested her head on my shoulder and for a fleeting moment, I could pretend that none of it had happened, that the last three days had just been an awful dream, that she was just sleeping peacefully on me like she had on Mother’s Day and the day after. Finally, the tears fell. They turned into sobs, as I realized that it was all real, that my gorgeous, amazing child was dead, that once we left the room, I would never get to hold her again. I rocked back and forth with her on my shoulder, crying for her, crying for us, crying all that would never be.

We continued to hold her, first one of us, then the other, then us both, until it just seemed time to let go. I laid her back on the bed and pulled the blanket up to her shoulders. All the swelling from all the fluids they had been pumping into her had finally receded and she looked like herself again. I was so grateful to get to see her that way. She looked like she was sleeping.

We cut locks of her hair for everyone in the family who wanted one and talked with the nurse about making her handprints and footprints and the mold of her hand. And then I really have no idea how the rest of it went. Somehow, we started packing up the room, cleaning up all the debris of a three-day stay in the PICU, balloons, books, toys, clothes, phones, food, trash. Somehow, we carted it all out. I think about it now and wonder how in the world I participated in that, when my child was lying dead on the bed in the center of the room. I’ve felt regret over it, thinking of how we bustled about as if she were no longer even there. And I honestly can’t remember leaving the room for the final time. I can’t remember if I lingered at the door for one last look at her. I hope I did, but I really don’t recall. I think I was just on autopilot. I don’t know that there was any other way to be.

But what I remember, what I will never, ever forget, was the feeling of her resting on my shoulder, both in our glider at home and there in PICU as we said goodbye. Every time I see a child resting on a parent’s shoulder in that same way, I remember. Such an ordinary, typical pose for them. Such an extraordinary memory and meaning for me.

Rest, my sweet, sweet girl. Rest in so much peace. Mommy loves you.

Long Goodbye

I heard a story on Bob Edwards Weekend today about “dignified transfer,” the process by which the remains of fallen American soldiers are returned to their families in the States. During one transition between interviews with parents and spouses of some of these soldiers, they played part of a song I’d never heard before. I couldn’t find a YouTube video, but if you’d like to listen to it, Rhapsody will let you play it for free at this page.

This song is both melancholy and hopeful, I think. Just like I am.

I miss you, my sweet girl.

Nothing But a Long Goodbye ~ David Mallett

Some days shine so brightly
Gold dust in a pan
Some days you hold so lightly
They go slippin’ right through your hands

And those of us who are so lucky
Get to grow old before we die
Sometimes it seems this old life
Ain’t nothing but a long goodbye

Falling leaves outside my window
On this October night
I do believe that the last rose of summer
Is fading in fright

And when I see the seasons changing
Brings a tear unto my eye
Sometimes it seems this old life
Ain’t nothing but a long goodbye

Every day people leaving
For someplace far away
Every day people grieving
Over things they didn’t do or say

And in the great big picture
It’s just the twinkle of an eye
Sometimes it seems this old life
Ain’t nothing but a long goodbye

Forgot One

Somehow this one got left out of yesterday’s batch.  And it’s one of my favorites.  She was such a loving child.  She loved on everything and everyone. 

My sweet girl.

Six Months: Remembering

Six months. Half a year. More than one-third of the time Hudson was with us on the earth. I have no idea how we got here, but here we are. Despite the inexplicable additional sadness of this particular anniversary, I still love to and need to remember my girl. 

As I’ve mentioned before, last fall was the point in Hudson’s life at which she really started interacting, learning by leaps and bounds, engaging in independent play. November was the first month we had our new digital SLR camera, so we took lots and lots of pictures. I am so grateful that we did—these photos really capture Hudson’s big, bright spirit. It was a spirit she already possessed but was just really beginning to grow into and show off. It was an enchanting time to be her parents, and I’m just so glad that we caught so much of it on camera. I realized yesterday that I never had time to post our November photo album on Facebook last year, so many of these photos will be ones that no one has really seen except for Ed and me.  I also realized that in 6 more months, I will have exhausted all the photos there are to share of the final year of Hudson’s life. Oh, my.

On a warm day in the early part of November, we took Hudson to the National Zoo.  Hudson had been once before, but she was really too little to enjoy it.  Not this time.  You can see in the second picture that she was too busy looking at the elephants to pose for a picture.  She loved it so much, we joined the Friends of the National Zoo that day.  I just got our membership renewal papers in the mail yesterday.  Who would think that something so ordinary as that could be so very sad?

These pictures are from what became typical playtime at home with Hudson.  Trying on her Halloween costume again (we had not yet put it away).  Climbing in and out of the rocking chair, saying “Rocky-rock.”  Getting in and out of the Bumbo seat, which she was too big for, but which we used to hold her still in the bathtub while we rinsed the soap off of her.

And of course, always a favorite pastime, hanging out at the front door watching the world go by.

I remember the moments of these next pictures like they happened yesterday.  I had run downstairs to get something and put Hudson in her crib for safekeeping, not realizing that she was tall enough to reach up and grab the box of tissue sitting on top of the bookcase next to her crib.  When I got back upstairs, this is what I found.  I immediately went back downstairs for the camera. 

By this time, she had become an excellent eater-- mealtime became one of our favorite times of day.

For Thanksgiving, Hudson’s school sent home a turkey for us to decorate as a family. I thought this was a pretty good time to try finger painting for the first time. I think Hudson did, too.

In mid-November, we took a trip down to NC to celebrate Thanksgiving with our law school friends, who have had an annual get-together ever since our first year of law school. Look at that grin. 

And these were our first attempts at taking her 11-month photo.  Sometimes, she just could not be bothered to sit still for it, as was the case on this day.  Her sock was way more interesting than we were.  Again, the grin.

As I look at these photos, I am again struck by how impossible it seems that this sweet soul, this precious face, this mischievous smile, this amazing creature is not here anymore. I just can’t comprehend that—to me, she practically jumps out of these photos. How can a child so alive not be?

I miss you so much, my sweet, sweet Hudson.  I’ll never stop missing you or wishing you were here.

Awful Symmetry

I had the most astonishing dream last night. One in which I was so incredibly happy that the second I woke up and realized it was just a dream, I immediately burst into tears, right there in the bed. In the first part of the dream, I was at the emergency room. I don’t know why I was there, but my mother (who died almost eight years ago) picked me up to take me back home. We crossed across a back, secret side of the hospital where we saw some terrible things, and then crossed out into the front of the hospital where it was sunny and our car was parked at the bottom of a grassy hill. And there was Hudson, sitting on the grass. All of sudden my dad was there instead of my mom. I went over and picked up Hudson and said to my dad, “You know, they said that she was not going to make it this long, but here she is.” From what I understood in the dream, Hudson had had the same illness, with a traumatic brain injury, and had been given a short prognosis of time to live. But she had lived a while—she just hadn’t spoken at all during that time. My dad said, “Maybe we should get her checked out again.” I put Hudson back down and she leaned over and grabbed the front of her diaper and said, “My poop fall out!” and smiled (Before Hudson died, we had just started trying to gauge her interest in potty training by pointing out where the potty was, asking her if she was pooping when we could see that she was, and helping her learn that she had poop in her diaper. So when we’d ask her, “Hudson, where is your poop?” she would grab the front of her diaper.) I looked at my dad, astounded, and said, “She said a whole sentence!” I grabbed her up, looked her over, and started crying tears of joy. She was better. I tested her, saying, “What’s this?” pointing to her nose, and she said, “Nose!” “And what’s this?” pointing to her eyes, and she said, “Eye!” We went through other words. I was shaking with joy in the dream, sobbing over our good fortune that somehow she had recovered from this terrible injury and was going to be all right. I said, “Oh, my sweet girl, Mommy missed you so much!” That second, I woke up. It took me only another second to realize that I was lying in my bed, in my dark bedroom, and that Hudson wasn’t there. She didn’t recover. She didn’t live. She is gone. She is still gone. All the joy I had felt in my dream vanished, and immediately, I began to cry.

Later, as I tried to fall back to sleep, I wondered if this dream might be a product of my dread of today—the 6-month anniversary of Hudson’s death. There is so much terrible symmetry about this day—maybe the dream (and the waking from the dream) was just one more manifestation of that symmetry. Six months ago, we said goodbye to the most precious being we have ever known, the most amazing creature we could have imagined having the privilege to parent. We said goodbye to her in a hospital room a few hundred yards away from the room in the hospital next door where she was born only 17 months and 12 days earlier. Six months from now, we will be preparing to greet our second child (or, if the Little Penguin is anything like its older sister and decides to arrive 10 days early, we may be in the process of greeting it) in a hospital room a few hundred yards away from the room where we said goodbye to Hudson, and only a few feet away from the room where we welcomed her two and a half years before. I know that many folks might encourage me to see the glass half full today—yes, it has been six months since Hudson died, but it is only six more months until we welcome the new baby. And that is true. And I am grateful that we are having another baby. But today, my glass feels not just half empty. It feels almost all the way empty, because Hudson will not be here to welcome that baby with us, and that is just so totally wrong in every possible way.

I have tried in the past to spend these month anniversaries remembering my girl, and I will do that today, too—but for reasons that I don’t even really understand, today is different, and I needed to acknowledge that.