Leo,

I was sitting in a quiet room with a womb-like feeling. It was dark but comfortable and you were asleep in my arms. I snuggled you into my chest and sighed the sigh of a happy mother in love with her newborn son. I smelled your head – that sweet baby smell, and tried to take the moment in. I felt embraced by love, I felt Heaven. And then suddenly I realized that I was inside of your casket with you. I wasn’t scared but I was so heartbroken that you were gone. I was on the outside looking in, as if traveling in a backward direction. I could see you, then both you and me, I could see the wooden box, I could see the earth surrounding us, the grass, then the cemetery; and in an instant, I woke up.

I’m usually an astute dream interpreter but I can’t seem to wrap my mind around this one. Watching our community grieve the loss of another child brings back a lot of unresolved emotions. Watching other people, who haven’t lost a child, grieve the loss of this baby is challenging at times. It’s hard for me to hear or read their doubts, their anger, their sadness.

I’ve built a foundation to grow from since losing you, and being back at the beginning, seeing someone else’s grief journey start, seeing the community shaken and mourning another loss, is quite confusing for me. Watching well-wishers stumble through trying to support their friends, trying to understand this loss, shakes my foundation. As I’m seeing and hearing people muse the purpose of child loss it’s creating cracks in my foundation. I already went through this; my heart already came to terms with this. Why am I back at the beginning again? Why am I seeing their negative, raw emotions and allowing them to create sadness in me? Those are not my emotions, they’re theirs. Those are not my feelings, they’re theirs. They haven’t been through this, I have.

I don’t pretend to have all the answers, let alone some of the answers, all I know is how I felt, how I feel, what I’m scared of, what I need. I’m back at the beginning, having to give grace to strangers for their feelings on someone else’s loss that is so sadly reminiscent of the loss I had 1 1/2 years ago…not long ago at all.

God give me a sea of grace from which I can continuously drink. I cannot be overtaken by the waves of grief crashing over my foundation. I won’t allow it, I can’t allow it. But as the ocean waves so notoriously promise to ware down the sharpest glass into a beautiful rounded pebble, so to do waves of grief ware down the strength of my foundation. Perhaps it will be worn down into something more beautiful than I knew possible.

All I have is hope. I love you and I miss you in ways that words, that minds, cannot comprehend.

Forever,
Mom