Band Aids & Celebrating Life

It has been a better day for us, by no means was it a good day, nor an easy day nor a tearless day. But we crawled out of bed and made the decision to get dressed not in sweats all day and start being able to talk about things here and there. Losing Chase, there are no words that could properly explain just how much of a roller coaster of emotions I am. Questions we had to ask ourselves were where do we go from here? How do we go back to work or continue our lives like before? How do we deal with our grief individually and also together? How do we begin to heal? I will not share all the personal details of our decisions and I assure you it will take many "better" days and conversations to even answer some the questions but I will share my personal decision on how to heal. One of the ways came when I was sitting in what would've been Chases room and taking a moment, I was staring down at the band aid over where my IV was in my wrist and the other was actually Bryans idea, one that would've never crossed my mind. so on to the Band aids!

Sometimes your walking along and something that you didn't see jumps out at you and you take a fall, sometimes it's a big fall. Depending on what might be going on in your life before or during your fall you might react in several ways. You may yelp or scream, it may hurt like hell and the tears may start pouring or it may hurt like hell and you become angry and swearing...maybe even both. So you get up and see this big cut and you start to take steps to put on a band aid and heal. You make an attempt to stop crying or being angry, you try to clean up the area, you try to figure out or come to terms with how you fell in the first place.

When you put a band aid on a cut several things begin to happen. The blood starts absorbing onto the tissue,   you cover up the opening to prevent infection, the cut begins to seem not so awful for a day. The next day or week you may notice that the cut is starting to heal and to keep it healing you have to maintain it by re cleaning and putting on fresh band aids.

One day you wake up and there is a scab looking at you, it is the cross roads of a cut. You are frustrated, do you wait for it to fall off and live with this irritating scab or do you tackle it head on and rip it off quickly even if it hurts? It is a personal decision and every one chooses differently but no matter what you choose you end up with a scar, a constant reminder of that fall and the healing process you went through.

In no way could I ever look you in the eye and say I find losing my first born child to be so easily comparable to a cut on my knee but I can say that for a tiny minute in that room I felt like I was being showed a way to heal that in some way the healing process never changes just the situation and magnitude of pain. That I'm going to go through steps to get there and sometimes it might seem like there will be "scabs" but that its okay to nurse myself and there is no right or wrong way to heal, that no matter what way I go the end result is a scar, a beautiful, complex scar for me to one day be able to talk about when people ask.

The second way is that Bryan told me he felt I should keep this blog. I was a little taken aback at first, I just assumed my last post would be my last...that the story had ended, the journey over. I know that while I don't typically show Bryan every post before I publish it that he reads them all and he has told me on several occasions that he loves that I started the blog and proud of me for trying to reach out to others but this thought again never occurred to me. I asked him what he meant and he told me that it should be in Chases honor, that his journey doesn't end with us and that the blog should follow us on healing, on day trips, on vacations on future pregnancies on whatever happens in our life because just like in our hearts he is with us and we should keep this part of him and celebrate him as part of our family just like we would have before.

Nothing in the world made more sense to me and I secretly felt ashamed that I hadn't thought of it to begin with, so here I am typing away and telling you about how every day no matter how hard or sad I am going to find a reason to smile for my little boy and to continue this journey with him in our hearts.

We did take pictures when Chase was born but were not quite ready yet to share the pictures so Bryan and I thought about it and decided to take some of the pictures we didn't get to as today would have been our Maternity shoot. (Special thanks to Sara for the shirts!!!)

On June 29, 2012 We brought an Angel into this world and that is something for us to smile about today!