I dreamed about Kenneth last night. I'm not sure what to make of it.
In my dream, I was in a room with two cribs. One was the crib belonging to Grant, and the other one was full of stuffed animals, toys, and the like. I was panicking as I looked into the crib that was full of toys, looking for Kenneth. As I was looking, he stood up in this crib from underneath all of the toys, laughed, and put his arms up to be picked up. In my dream, he was the same age Grant is now, even though he died when he was a month old. I laughed and picked him up, and started looking for ways to take his ventilator and his ECMO pump with him so that I could take him out of the room with me. I told someone else in the dream that I could take the ventilator with me, but not the pump, and then I woke up.
Any wannabe dream interpreters out there want to take a crack at that one?
I sure miss that boy. Holidays seem to make his absence sharper.
Grief doesn't have a time limit. This is a lesson I've learned the hard way as time has gone on. I've been fortunate in life to have not lost anyone close to me before Kenneth died, so his death and my subsequent grief journey is the only experience I have with loss. I've heard that the loss of a child is different, somehow, to other kinds of loss. I wouldn't know. I suppose one day, I'll face the loss of others that are dear to me, and then I'll have a means of knowing. Until then, I have this.
There are a thousand little ways that losing a child still hurts, even several years later. It's the small stab of pain when a stranger, smiling, asks you "How many children do you have?". It's the guilt you feel when you consider saying "One" when the answer is really "Two", just so that you don't have to see the pity in the stranger's eyes or explain that your other child is dead. It's the feeling of incompleteness in your home that will never really go away, because one is and will always be missing. It's feeling joy at watching your living child meet his milestones, while simultaneously feeling grief that you never got to see that same milestone with your lost child. It's going on with life with a measure of happiness, all the while feeling a little guilty because when your child died, you were sure your capacity for happiness died too, and to experience it again feels like a betrayal. It's feeling guilt for thinking of your dead child while playing with your living one.
Since we lost Kenneth, blogging has become my means of coping with his death. I can wrestle with the thoughts that plague me, get them out in writing so that I can organize them and make sense of them. I'd thought that I should change the direction of my blogs, but the reality is that Kenneth's life and death are such a huge part of me now. I cannot make him the focus of my "real life", because I have a living child who needs me and who should not have to live in his brother's shadow. Blogging about Kenneth and my grief allows me to keep it in it's proper place, out of my head and away from Grant for the time being.
This blog will continue to talk about Kenneth, and grief, and death, and life. They're all one big tangle in my head, maybe because they're all interconnected. Kenneth changed me permanently, and it would be wrong for me to pretend that my life is the same as it was before. Time has healed me of the anguish that went with his loss, but not the chronic pain that comes with knowing that he will always be gone. Time can't take away the well-meaning strangers, the little stabs of pain, the unreasonable feelings of guilt. They're a part of the new life that I have, a part of my new normal.
I'm a blog slacker now. I used to write all the time, and now it feels like I have nothing to say. My days go something like this...
Wake up.
Eat and get ready.
Go to work.
Pick up Grant.
Spend an hour or two with Grant before he goes to bed.
Play around on the computer/watch tv
Go to bed.
Repeat.
I do have my share of angst and all of that good stuff, but I feel like I've already said all I can say about the bad stuf. I'm wanting to post about good things, but the good things seem to be hard to write about without coming across as trite. We have drama with the house, but I think at this point it's out of our hands. We'll hire the lawyer, bleed money to pay for the experts, and it will eventually get settled... or at least that's what we hope.
Life seems to vacillate between the mundane and major drama. I don't know if everyone's life is like mine, with all of the bizarre bad things that seem to happen, but it really doesn't matter in the long run. You take the hand you're dealt and do the best with it that you can. Whining isn't going to solve anything, even if it does make me feel better for a few minutes.
So. Good things. Grant has taken his first step. He'll be a year old in a week. I have a great husband, an adorable little boy, and a house that has a perfect floorplan, even if the foundation is crap. LOL. I do miss hanging out with friends, but if that's the price to pay for having kids, I'd pay it over and over again. Life is what it is, and it's time I stopped bitching about it and start making the best of it.
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