6/30 - Time

Yes, it is true in a sence that for some things time does heal. But that doesn't apply to everything, and it's the one thing I see written over and over by parents who are grieving their loss - time doesn't offer us shit.

In two days, Kilian will have been gone for a month. Gone almost as long as he was here. And the last few days, it just feels worse and worse. It being this hovering cloud of darkness that now has found a permanent home within you. A realization of emptiness that will never go away. In conversation, a nagging thought in the back of your mind. You find yourself constantly wishing that someone would bring your child up, because all you want to do is talk about them. Especially in our situation, he's a newborn. We should be talking about him non stop. Yet at the same time, you hope no one mentions 'what happened' because it brings condolences and awkward vibes.

I've lost a brother to an overdose. I've lost a close friend to her body just giving out. I've been the one to tell my brother he lost his best friend to a car accident, told my husband he lost a close friend to a motorcycle accident, watched two of my best friends lose a sibling each, lost family members to old age, friends to cancer, and two of my own babies to miscarriage. I've done loss every which way. Loosing your medically complex infant to his anomalies after open heart surgery and airway reconstruction and having to be the one to make that final decision, is on its own level.

I keep thinking about that day. They brought us snacks and drinks while Amelia was there. I remember so vividly her running to that cart full of goodies and snatching a rice crispies treat gleefully into her hand. It was like I could see all of her worries and concerns simply vanish in the prescence of something so incredibly valueless - it happened so effortlessly and in the middle of life support machines and hospital noise and impending death. I was and am so relieved that the emotional weight for her is going to be manageable, but that thought brings me to tears. My daughter sitting in the back of a cardiac intensive care unit room munching on snacks hours before we 'withdraw support' from her brother.

How is this my life.

Time will never heal these wounds. Time will never remove the visions I have of my perfect little baby boy completely broken after a 9+ hour surgery, the memory of him being taken from me while coding and turning blue, or the feeling of time suspended when his heart stopped the night he was born. All I can do from here, is relive these moments over and over until I can become numb to the bad ones, relish in the best ones, and move forward in a new way - with both good and bad now permanent fixtures in who I am.

I've met and am learning a new me, the only thing time has to offer is deficient detail and uncertainty of what lies ahead. I'm not interested in that. I'm not interested in throwing more days into the how long Kilians been gone bottomless pit. I'm not interested in 'not thinking about him so much'. Time gave me so little that an apology is all I would take from it. Beyond that, to me it has no use.

Kilian has given me the capacity to view 'the rest of my life' as nothing more than this current day. What happens tommorow can't bribe its way into my thoughts. I've been completely lost in the now and despite its sad, its bitter, its heartbreak - today was actually an ok day. So your time you can keep. I'm going to hang out in the 'la la land' of 'in this moment' my mind has stumbled its way into. Its a raw, emotional, bitch of a place - but its real. And honestly, I think most would prefer it.