When people tell me you’re so strong and I can’t imagine and I don’t know what I would do, a part of me feels like I’m showing a false front. To some degree, I can understand what they mean: how painful it is to fathom losing a child, how it’s such a crippling trauma. But I don’t have a choice but to live in this world where babies die, in a world where my babies die.
The fact that I’m still breathing, that I’m able to go through the motions of everyday living—and especially during my early days of grieving—was not a choice. It was more the result of kinetics, of the laws of energy. The world is turning, and it turns me with it. It pushes me, and even when I resist, eventually I must move. That is how I’ve survived. I think that’s how many of us have survived whatever traumas, hardships, and losses we’ve been handed.
I’m not here laying my heart across the interwebs because I’m full of courage. I write of things once (still?) silenced behind the push to “move on” because this is my way of mourning. This is my way of processing my grief. And even now, two years out from losing my first of three-consecutive-babies-gone-to-heaven, I still have trouble navigating this baby loss path. I still don’t know what to do with it all. What I do know is that it keeps changing and morphing. That it continually fills me with the need to find more and more and more ways to let this grief out, to process this longing, to validate my babies’ lives, to express my love for them. This is where I’ve found my own kinetic energy—apart from the world’s constant motion and prodding. I’ve begun to find reason for being and living and putting one foot in front of the other as I was walk the timeline of my life.
What keeps moving you forward right now?
Where does your kinetic energy come from today? Where did it come from in the days immediately after your loss? Has it changed? Are you being pushed (or dragged) along by the world outside of you and your grief? Have you found your own impetus to move forward?
This post is a part of a series called Unpacking Grief, which I began as part of the Blogging from A to Z April Challenge.
Sometimes when I’m in the dark place the impetus comes from outside myself and from knowing that inertia would affect those I love. Sometimes it comes from that nugget of hope deep inside that tells me I must keep moving because to not move would be akin giving up on becoming a parent to a living child. Mostly it comes from love.
I have no idea how I kept going immediately after George’s death. Ultimately it’s just what we do as humans. We have adaptability and resilience hard wired into our DNA: we are survivors. And, as you say, we have no choice.
Hugs
xxx
Thank you for sharing, Barbara. I like when you wrote that it comes from love and that giving up after losing our babies would be like giving up on parenting a living child. That is so true.