Now I Know it Can Happen to Me

Sometime in life things happen and you are never, ever the same.  As much as I wish my life was like it was before, it will never be.  I have a hard time accepting this but I know deep down is true.  Before I lived a life where things mostly worked out and if they didn't I could usually in the end say that it was for the best.  Those awful things that happened, well they happened to someone else.  Not me.  That was the person I was when I walked into the hospital expecting to welcome my daughter.  We had an ultrasound and knew that things were not quite right but everyone said that things should be just fine.   With a few days in the neonatal ICU she would be just fine.  Of course I believed that, with all my heart.  Things always work out...just have faith.  I had complete trust that I was immune from tragedy.  Several hours later things changed.  My daughter arrived stillborn.  Life as I knew it was shattered.   

The doctor told us they did everything they could.   Minutes before they had a heartbeat but despite their best efforts were unable to revive our daughter.  I cried and cried.  We held our beautiful baby and muddled through that night and the days that followed. We picked out a tiny casket and got together the going home outfit and gave it to the funeral home for her to be buried in.  Everything felt backwards.  I thought it was that we were buying a burial plot instead of one the high chairs I had been looking at just a week before, and it was that.   It was that but it was something else too.

When we lost my daughter I changed.  I can never be the person I was before.  That innocence and trust that things will just work themselves out is not longer part of who I am.  I have joined the ranks of those to whom bad things happen.  I am part of the club that no-one wants to be a member of.    At times I wish with all my might that I could go back to how it was before but I know that will never happen. Still I have much to be grateful for.  I thank God for my son and and the light that he has been and continues to be in my life, friends who have rallied around me and for my husband and family who are also grieving with me.

I am still trying to figure out exactly who this new person is that I have become.  From all outside appearances nothing has changed but my heart which has been broken holds the light of the little girl who couldn't stay and the world I live in seems less certain.  I hope the new me will in some way be a better person.  That I will live more fully, be more compassionate and hold more dearly that which I have, for I now know that not all stories have a happy ending.