Creating Meaning

So if you read my last post you'll know what I am talking about. I bought the sweater. It is so stinking cute and I figure if this babe does not make it, eventually I will give it to a living baby boy. Anyway I am on two count downs right now. One week until the year anniversary of my son's stillbirth and 12 weeks until i will be induced. Also going through my head is a count of the number of months (3) since my friend passed away in a tragic accident. A strange comparison of sorts creeps into my mind. I am thinking about where I was at on the 3 month anniversary of my son dying. I think I had just about hit the bottom of my grief. It would have been September 21, 2011. I cried everyday. I woke up every morning feeling like I had been hit by a emotional truck load of crap that I had to sort through before I could move on with the day. My husband and I had also began using Clomid again to try to conceive another baby. (It took 4 rounds to be successful). That had its own bundle of emotional junk. I have been trying to pin point the time in which I started to feel better. I guess between 6 and 8 month passed.


I think what helped me most was having things to look forward to again. Nothing made the loss go away but even small things that were interesting to me helped me continue to function. Anne and my husband and I went on a short trip to Tofino in Sept, we went to Cranbrook in December for a baptism and April for my niece and nephew's birthdays, we went to Victoria in May for mother's day. Making small daily plans with friends and family helped too. Anyway I guess I am saying all this because I remember at 3 months thinking I would never feel normal or better. Well, I do feel better but I have found a new normal. A normal that sometimes includes grief and sadness but not the crippling kind. I still think about my lost baby everyday. I wonder what he would be like now, how it would be to have two living children and expecting a third. Its a completely different path that is gone now.

So back to my initial purpose of this post. Creating meaning. My therapist and a few other people have asked what my plans for my son's anniversary are. I have been thinking really hard about it. I have had thoughts around releasing balloons and lighting candles but I want to create a legacy. I want to be able to give what I should have given to him to someone else. So I think I am going to "sponsor a child" in baby Steve's memory. I have some research to do on which agency to use but I would like it to be a boy. Age is not super important. Hopefully when Anne is old enough to understand she will capture the importance of giving instead of taking. I believe that when we* are ready, so much personal healing happens when we give to others and see them benefiting from our efforts. It moves us from a self-centered focus to a focus on others and helps us be grateful for what we do have and helps us acknowledge it really could "always be worse." So that is where I am at today.

*we being anyone bereaved or dealing with trials