Grieving Parents Support Network

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Due Date

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As my day turns into next…

I was supposed to be all covered in flour. Mixing bowls on the counter, choosing how to decorate a cake – an animal theme. Two candles ready…an eager boy ready to blow. Wishes for a firetruck, a farm – filled when you opened your presents. Excitement, laughter, kisses.

Instead of gifting you, little man, let me tell you how you gifted me in the time you have been gone.

You have given me the gift of sight to see brighter and wider, to see beyond the physical, beyond the visible, to see what I would never see before, to see you in everything I do.

You have expanded my heart in ways I never thought possible.

Your absence has filled my life with the most amazing people, who know how it is to miss, but also know what it means to love and hurt at the same time. People who have helped me see the beauty when all I could see was darkness. Who love us and let us love them.

WYou have opened this door to a world I never wanted to enter, a world I never want to leave. A world full of possibilities, new beginnings, honesty. 

Without you, I finally know who I really am as a person, as Your mami. I never wished for it this way, but I will always be grateful for the gift you are.I hope you know how much I love you and how I long to see you grow in front of me. I wish I could watch you blow your second candle.

I miss you so much. Words will never be enough to explain…I love you, always.

P.S. And… this weeping willow reminded me of you.

With Love, Tina

Image Credit: Tina’s personal archive 

A Different Kind of Place

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I was reflecting on the lunch meeting I had on Monday. A fellow bereaved mother sat across from me and we seemingly interacted like everyone around us. But were we really?
The place was crowded and the tables were close together, the sound of chatter filled the space, word exchanges, gestures, smiles… we did the same, but our conversations seemed to have been a bit different. Very uneventful and fluent for us, but the silence and looks from the table beside us let us know we were using words that startled people. Talking about our dead children and death in general is just a part of our conversation but I guess it is a different kind of narrative, ours and theirs.
I was looking at my friend, smiling, even laughing from time to time. Her whole body language is different from the time I met her. Even though she still feels very much on a hunt for peace and meaning, she is different from the woman I met 2 years ago. I don’t remember  the time we first met like this, in a setting outside our support group, just her and me. That was in the time when my mind was still completely absent and disconnected. We persisted, and now 2 years later, even not remembering the starts, I can see our progress. Her progress and my progress. I never knew I was going to learn this, life without him, I think she never thought she would learn life without her son either. But there we were, talking and smiling, two friends having lunch, deliberating on new ways to look for our boys within this life without them.

With Love, Tina

The Inbetween

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Tina, personal archive

He was missing. He was missing way before. Way before he became. His place was with us before I was facing secondary infertility and he just did not happen, his place was with us before we moved countries, his place was with us even when we held our first newborn son while mourning my husband’s mother. He was a part of our family before he ever became one. Missing him now is a result of all of it, of him being a part of the US way before his time, the yearning for him then and now, the wishing to see him grow in all the ways, the dreams for him becoming a beautiful human. All of it will remain the missing and the love. New missing will be added on to the heaps of missing and love that has been a part of me, before he was there, before he was growing and before he was growing no more.
His face will always be missing from our family photograph, his wet kisses will never reach my cheeks, his footsteps will never echo in our house, his laughter never fill a room, his voice never call my name and his eyes will never sparkle.
Still, as much as he is missing, he is also there and within and all around too. His presence is the part of me I cannot explain, the part of me that formed and continues to form and grow in the After. The change in me his death brought. I do not remember myself without him. How was I ever complete? How can I be complete when he is not here?

With Love, Tina

Lesson 7: Forgiveness is Essential

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Forgiveness is Essential

Learning to forgive has been the hardest part of my healing journey. The wounds inflicted by cold and unsupportive loved ones cut deep. I resisted forgiveness for a long time because I misunderstood it. I thought it meant giving the harmful people in my life a pass and saying that what they did is okay with me now or no longer matters. Real forgiveness isn’t saying its okay. It’s actually saying it’s so NOT ok that I refuse to be connected to it anymore. Real forgiveness is about freeing myself from bondage, not freeing the one who harmed me from accountability. When I choose to forgive I set myself free. And free people are powerful people capable of bringing hope and healing to a hurting world. Give yourself the gift of forgiveness. Set yourself free to heal and watch how your healing helps other find healing also.

Lesson 6: A Legacy is Not a Replacement

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Legacy is Not a Replacement

Co-founding Teamotions has given me a meaningful way to create a legacy for Aubrey and Ellie and I’m very proud of what we’ve accomplished, but its success has not for one second been worth losing them. I’d trade it all in a heartbeat to have my babies back. It is impossible to replace them. I’ve learned that starting a company will never fill the void, nor will writing a book, having another baby, or any of the other things we do as we move forward with our lives. Keeping their memory alive isn’t the same as healing my heart. Nothing external will ever replace the internal work that healing requires and I honor them by healing my heart more than honoring their memory ever could.

Tonight

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Tina, personal archive

Everything of the last weeks has been focused on today.

Joining a choir has been one of the most gentle, healing and important choices I have made for myself in the last six months. Every week’s practice has been the place to relax, cry, laugh and connect. I sometimes feel like I live my life as an observer, more looking at what is happening than actually living it, and observing this situation as I make new connections from week to week has been so fulfilling. Life as an expat, especially since Tapio died has been very different from the life I used to live, a life full of people and laughter and a permanent smile has been traded for isolation and distance. I think I needed to be ready, ready to actively dive into a crowd, in my case a big group of women and a man that share my love for music and singing. It was so scary at first and I won’t say that I don’t feel like the odd one out still sometimes as the language barrier is still very present and I mostly just do what everyone else does not really understanding why, but more and more people volunteer to explain what they feel is useful for me to know. I didn’t know how much I needed this group, how much my heart needed to sing or how my son’s presence would dance on the notes every time the music started.

Monday’s rehearsal has been far from perfection that we might want to aim for, but we all still left smiling, though tired, and looking forward to today – the concert. The way I see it, even though the concert is open to the public and mostly families come to see it, the whole show is for us, our reward, for attending the rehearsals, for learning new songs, for making space for diversity, for opening our hearts to different cultures and languages, music, each other, to heal all the little and big aches we might be facing and to just occupy a beautiful space together.

And as I add on one more discovery about myself after my son died – taking pictures, writing and now singing – I hope he is proud, and I hope he knows he is the one giving me all the courage to be vulnerable like that.

Tonight, when the hall in our town’s Culture center fills up, we will live up to our name as we Sing and Shine.

 

With Love, Tina

The Day I Left Him Behind

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Tina, personal archive

The memory of that day is still very present for me. The day that I held it together while I was falling apart. The day that has so much meaning, but I wish it did not exist. The day that was so full but left me going home empty handed.

That day that started it all, this process, this work, this world. The world with and without him in it, all at the same time. When loving him intensely means walking this thorny path of grief. Living in this place where there is only feelings, feelings that don’t need defining but just are, just exist as they are, all mixed together all at the same time.

I remember looking around as I opened the door of my room. I had a little backpack, it held an extra set of clothes I had packed the night before – just in case. All my papers were in it too, I didn’t know what they said and I still don’t,  written in a language I do not understand. I set to go, out to the corridor where the noise of screaming babies filled my head. How can a place so perfect, so alive feel so wrong and full of death. The corridor seemed extremely long and when it turned the even longer stretch came into sight. I passed the nurses booth, their body language was different then the day before when they were still hopeful, telling me they had been waiting on my arrival. Now, all of them looking to the floor or occupied with their heads turned towards a computer. Leaving felt like a walk of shame. A walk of shame where my arms hurt from all the emptiness they carried, my head full of images of my perfect, silent boy, my mind spinning with the enactment of the labor and birth of my sweet son. I felt like I took a breath when I opened the room door and I only exhaled when I got shocked by the rain as I finally made it out of the building. I sat in the car and cried for what felt like hours. At some point I started it and drove home.

It is how I entered grief or how grief entered me. It has been a while since that day and some of the images have changed, some have started to vanish and I am sure I add on depending on how I feel in a certain moment. But the day I left him behind will remain one of the hardest days in my life. But it will also go as the day he was born, the only day I held him and the only time we were together and separate at the same time. In retrospect, the heaviest day in my life is like grief, full of mixed up emotions that just are as they are.

With Love, Tina

Connection

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If you are like me, you look for things that you associate with your child. Symbols, objects, anything that closes the gap between here and there just a little.
First, I had a painting made. I had a vision of a fun loving boy riding on a shooting star in the sky above me. He was always going to be there, riding his star at all times, always keeping close. That painting is what I wake up to every morning. I love it, I miss it when I am gone, it brings unexplainable comfort to me. It is how I picture him, having fun.
Everything else is focused on one object. A tree is his symbol, forest his domain. I love every single one of them, the ones growing behind our house, the one around my neck or the one that is permanently inked on my arm. They are all gap fillers, they are what makes there closer to here in my eyes, these are the things that help me on a daily basis, that let me feel some comfort and give me the feeling he is present and with me at all times.
I never was this person that puts much value in symbols and signs, that has changed as much as I have changed. I look for him everywhere, I keep finding him everywhere too. He is with me always. I can almost hear him whisper and call me when I am walking through a forest, when the sun penetrates the branches and lights up my face I can almost feel his touch or when the melody of his song bounces from the walls of our home, I can hear his laughter.
How do you keep the connection?
With Love, Tina

Lesson 5: Healing is Holistic

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Healing is Holistic

I am constantly asked if I could give a grieving mom one piece of advice, what would it be? The truth is, there is no one thing. I had to adopt an entirely different way of living. I had to make caring for my heart a lifestyle. Everything I did on my healing journey mattered; what I ate and drank, how much rest and exercise I got, whom I allowed close to me and set boundaries with, sorting out my faith and having honest conversations with God, serving others when I got strong enough – all of it helped me knit myself back together. Healing required I didn’t cut any corners.

Lesson 4: Grief Didn’t Get Lighter, I Got Stronger

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Grief Didn’t Get Lighter, I Got Stronger

I miss my girls every day and I will until the day I die. This is just the reality of life without them. It is a myth that grief dissipates on its own. It doesn’t. Instead, I have learned how to become stronger so what used to be too heavy for me feels like a much lighter weight to carry. Healing took soul-conditioning. I had to train myself to get stronger in ways I didn’t even think I could. It was hard at first. Every day took all I had. I stuck with it though. I didn’t give up on myself or my future. Small gains led to bigger ones and the I’ll-never-be-okay-again Rachel rose up from the ashes to find that she is okay. I am okay because I have done the work.

 

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