What do you say?

For some reason lately I've been meeting a lot of new people. It's bizarre how every single person asks, "So, do you have any kids?" I always pause. ...Is this a person I'm going to talk to again, someone who might start telling me that I should really should have some because they're so great, someone who may care one way or another what actually happened? Most of the time I torpedo them. I say, "not any more and not yet." "What!?!" "Well, we had a boy, but he died and we've lost two since him, but we're still trying." They just sit there shocked for a moment then usually say something like, "I'm sorry to hear that. You should keep trying and you'll have one." Sometimes people have had similar experiences and have sympathy and hope to offer. Some are rendered speechless.

Most of the time I feel bad because they were all upbeat, happy to see me, thought they asked a safe question and they just got totally blindsided, but really I've found it's best for me, and perhaps the relationship, if I'm just honest upfront. When people don't know what's happened, they say all kinds of silly things that I really have a hard time tolerating.

What's the best way to break the news, "our baby died, and we've lost two since then. How about you?"

Construction Progress Goes "Crash"

In an effort to work out our feelings through construction, we have decided to remodel our master bathroom. While Micah is clearly the brains behind this operation, I am his chief assistant and general counsel. I make important decisions like which faucets to put in or how many jets I would like the new tub to have. This leaves Micah with the task of getting all those aesthetic decisions I made into the new bathroom. But never fear, his chief assistant is always available to help. Take this evening as an example. After helping my handsomely bearded contractor run the wire for the new lighting system, I decided to await further instructions while giving the new tub a dry run. Micah has captured my contribution to the labor of the evening and considers it an accurate portrayal...I am not so sure.

How we're doing now

Worn Out. I think that's the only way to describe it. It's almost like we're too tired to be sad any more. We've been sad for the last year and a half; we just can't take any more of it. This time, we were sad for about two days and then we were just done. Didn't have the energy to cry almost.

We feel like we have nothing left to say, and we don't really care to hear people tell us what God is going to do. And we're also not keen any more on hearing stories like so and so lost five babies, but then had three kids. The following analogy I think would fit and describe how we feel when we hear those stories. Let's say you've been in a bad car wreck and you're still a quadriplegic in a motorized chair. Someone comes up to you and says, "I saw this show a few days back about a guy in a wheel chair, just like you, and he said it was the best thing that ever happened to him because now he values life, he's overcome adversity and shown what you can accomplish with determination..." and you want to just drive over their toes and knock their shins. Those stories don't make us feel any better either.

Something we wish we could do better was talk to everyone who wants to talk to us. Many friends call, but we just don't have anything to say besides the same story: lost at 12 weeks, feel OK, very sad, yada yada. If we haven't gotten back to you we apologize, we just have a lot calls which we appreciate very much and don't have time or energy to call everybody back.

That's the hard part. The good part is that we thank everyone for their support. We do love getting the emails and voice mails that say, we're thinking of you, we're very sorry etc. We are so thankful for our friends and family. We're thankful that Rebecca is OK. They went and got the baby out, but no surgery was required so Rebecca is feeling much better this time.

Thank you again for your support. Even just you reading this blog is encouraging to us when we get to look at the stats and see that 2500 different people have read the blog and have visited from all over the world.

Take care, Micah

A little further down the road

Well, there's a couple things we've learned being a little further down the road after William. I'm not feeling very creative tonight so I'm afraid I'll default to a list.

1. We never, ever forget him. Not a day goes by we don't remember William, the hospital, the funeral, ... the loss. We'll never be normal again, it's kind of like getting your leg shot off, you just can't ever go back and be a dude with two regular legs again.
2. God has worked in us, Rebecca and I, through this process. We're kinder to each other and we're much more sympathetic with others. Even if others didn't lose their baby, they may just be having a bad day, fighting with a loved one or who knows, it's always important to be kind to people having a bad day.
3. We don't value stuff as much, a friend spilled a chocolate milk shake on our wedding quilt and instead of getting quite torqued over it, which I'm really good at, we both just said, "oh well, we'll clean it up, no problem." Now we know stuff is just stuff, and that people matter so much more. Our stuff can't hug us, bring us food, help us clean our house, kick us off the couch or love us. It's just stuff.

I know there are many different areas; we feel like totally different people, but these are the highlights I remember right now.

Developments

Well, it's been so long I actually have several developments at once to share. First we got pregnant, YAY!! So we told our families, waited a few weeks, then close friends, waited a few weeks, told everybody, next day, lost the baby, BOOOOOOOO! We lost our third baby at just under 12 weeks.

The doctor said that everything operated "as it should." In early stages of development, cell splitting and what not, if everything isn't going along great there's a sort of auto-terminate feature built into babies, so they tell me. They also tell me this is common, about 20% of all pregnancies end this way.

As horrible as it sounds, in my world this is progress. For the other two kids the doctors said, "we have no idea what happened, this isn't supposed to happen," and "wow, I'm glad you [Rebecca] made it, what happened to you is usually fatal." So now for them to say, that everything operated correctly, self-destruct feature included, it's at least progress. I hate it, and I wish it had never happened, but they say you have to look on the sunny side of life or something stupid like that.

What I remember

I don't usually post here on Micah's blog, but since he asked, I'm sharing.

The thing I remember most vividly was how many people were there. I wondered how I could ever explain to everyone who came to the funeral how grateful I was that they did. There were so many people, many of whom came from very far away, that in my hour of deepest sorrow, I was also profoundly thankful.

Even while I was still in the hosptial, one of the things that I was most afraid of was losing all our friends, too. I didn't want people to not be around us because they didn't want to feel uncomfortable. To be honest, it's likely how I would have felt if it had been one of my friend's baby instead of ours. It's hard to imagine that losing our sweet son could have been any worse, but the truth is: it could have been. Instead of just crazy, we could have been crazy and alone.

The second thing I often think about was the indescribable way that God held our broken hearts in his hands. When I was afraid of being alone, He sent friends in abundance. When nothing anyone said/brought/did could bring back our little boy, our loving heavenly Father gave us hope.

To everyone who came, brought us dinner, sent flowers, e-mailed, sent a card, dropped by, went to the grocery store, vacummed or did one of countless other things to help us, I am more thankful than I can describe. When the world had come to an end, you helped us keep going.

What do you remember?

During the funeral and graveside service we looked around and have images in our mind that we'll hopefully never forget. We remember what our pastor said, and I play the song we played by Jeremy Camp, "I still believe" quite a bit. We remember a lot, but we would love to hear from those of you who attended, what do you remember? Please leave a comment.

There's Nothing Left to Do

Well it's been a year. His first birthday was January 30th. We had a party for him at Bear Creek. Rebecca made a wonderful white cake with almond, cream cheese icing and we wrote "Happy Birthday William" on it. We took presents and balloons and let the balloons go. It was surreal having our own little party with no guest of honor. We left some of the presents there with him and brought some back to pass along.

The last couple weeks have been really hard. It has been a year so pretty much all of the "firsts" have happened, first birthday, first steps, etc. Rebecca and I have been talking and we're ready to sort of move on. We feel like a year of the hard crying is enough. It's a hard balance, we'll never forget, but we also don't want to be stuck in 2007 forever. But the last couple weeks that seems harder than ever to do. No sooner than we get this great idea, it seems impossible.

The week leading up to his birthday I cried every time I was in the car driving to or from work. I should be going home to see him, but he's not there. He would be so much fun now, but he's not here. For some reason the last couple weeks it just seems like the hole left by his absence seems enormous.

During the funeral and for the first couple weeks afterwards there was a lot to do. We had a lot of family in town. We were busy taking care of Rebecca after the surgery. We got to see family we hadn't seen in a long time. Along with the trauma we had a lot of fun and really good times as well. We've done all the big tasks, we set his head stone, had his first Christmas. We went from counting by days to weeks to months and now to years. Now, everyone's gone home, there's nothing left to do but be sad.