Stillness

March 10, 2010. One of the days in recent years that my brain takes a pause to reflect as I remember how it unfolded. My heart shutters as the recollection of events march forward. At each phase I will for them to be changed in a way that would make the result at the end of the day different, yet between then and now my mind has embraced the way everything was orchestrated to allow for peace to fill my soul. So emotion packed. Joy, despair, helplessness, trust, knowing that God was holding our situation in His very capable hands, worry, feelings of failure, feelings of accomplishment. Most of all the underlying current of the day filled me with stillness. The verse from Psalm 46 came to mind. "Be still and know that I am God." Stillness was all around me and being in the midst of it my soul was infused with new hope and, oddly, joy. Inexplicable joy. My soul was just as still as my womb where our Christopher had fallen into a forever earthly rest.

It is hard to believe that it was a year ago now that he died. The images of our little guy are so fresh in my mind and I hope that they will always stay that way. I remember seeing him for the first time and feeling completely overwhelmed that this was actually happening. I remember the awesome midwife that assisted with the delivery saying "He looks like a perfect little boy." I remember Craig sitting in the chair near my bed looking upon our son, his eyes brimming with tears of both pride and loss. And I remember that little body so perfect, complete and peaceful. It was at that moment that I realized how precious life is once again. How at some moment in the last day our tiny son's little heart gave its final beat and changed the future as we had planned it leaving feelings of hurt and confusion in its wake.

Shortly after his silent birth Craig and I had a heart to heart while passing our still son back and forth in his little basket. It was perhaps the conversation that changed our relationship from great to awesome. We talked between unrestrained tears about a lot of things with our souls exposed and vulnerable. That conversation ended with a a few promises to each other. One was that the day our son died would not also be the day that his parents stopped living. Our mindset in our journey, which required rather intense medical intervention, to becoming a family was always to choose life....no matter what. This time we needed to make a conscious decision, in honor of our son, to choose life not for him because it was too late, but for ourselves. We knew that there would be lots of new feelings and emotions that we likely had never felt before, and those thoughts could be given the power to either unite us further or break us down. We committed to unite, to share, to trust, and to pull together and to heal. Another promise was that we would not allow the sad place we found ourselves in that day to be where our journey becoming a family would end. Though the future could easily result in more loss and hurt we could not leave that hospital room and our son behind knowing that it was the end. It couldn't be. In honor of our son we would try again. He will always be my firstborn, always be very loved and very wanted and will never be replaced in our hearts or lives.

A lot of healing has taken place between then and now, but my heart will forever bear a scar from the hurt caused by the loss and my mind will always wonder how life would be if he had lived. We were blessed by his existence and have been blessed in ways that we never would have imagined since his passing.

So here's to a day of honoring our firstborn son whose time with us was much too short. Our son whose life brought us joy and purpose. Our son whose death left us broken but united. Our baby who made March 10 be a day that we celebrate the fact that he lived. Our sweet Christopher Job who was born into heaven last year on this day.