Saturday Morning Visit

The Camper

For lack of anything 'productive' to post today, I'm just gonna copycat.

This is our typical Saturday morning. Kids free-ranging, tearing the house apart and rearranging it to fit into their very imaginative plays. Somehow they have to fit what every individual child wants to play into one mass theme. So from what I can tell today it is a mobile animal rescue, cross country, adventure with a baby who is one but can walk and talk. What funny little children!

I should have taken a picture of the massive fort in my living room last week.

Regrets

Everyday Deklan's story replays itself in my mind. Every time it plays out a different way. Maybe if I'd stalled the doctors....Maybe if I'd demanded the antibiotics to be stopped sooner....If I'd held him more...How/what could I have changed so that he would have lived. I should have been stronger, smarter, better.

There is no doubt in my mind that Deklan could have been healed. Sometimes I think that it is the faith I had that makes it harder on me. It was the doctors' decision to take away the support that was keeping him alive. I wasn't strong enough at that time to fight their decision. Or even to realize I had the right to oppose it. If he had been taken by God, just slipped away unexpectedly, maybe I would have been more at peace with it. Ultimately I know that The Lord is stronger, and if Deklan was meant to live he would have, without life support. Part of me was expecting a miracle in that moment.

I hated the doctors. I hated their attitudes. I questioned everything. Maybe Deklan's healing had to be bigger than what they could have done for him. Maybe healing is not the way my mortal mind views it. Now he is safe from everything the doctors were doing to him. Everything I hated them for. He has been saved from pain and sorrow. He has been saved! Healed!

Not in the way we define healing though. It makes me sad that I couldn't heal him. I couldn't make him better. Mainly I feel like I was not enough for him. He needed more than I could do, than I could give. More than any person could do or give. The rational side of me knows that there was nothing more I could have done. I mean I had 6 doctors collectively telling me he wasn't going to make it. But my heart tells me that a mother's love can heal anything. My heart that is filled with regret...


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Little Brother

The saddest thing happened today, well maybe not the saddest, but it really tore at the old heart strings. Today the cat was lying in the bassinet I bought for Deklan. I don't know why its still in the living room, but it is. It sits in the spot it was in waiting for us to bring him home. Bedhead and I put it together a couple of weeks before he was born. Anyway, I run over and shoe the cat out of it. "You can't be in there" I say to her. Then Piper says, "Ya, Deklan's gonna sleep in there."

As well as we have tried to explain death to her, her little 2 year old mind doesn't quite get it. She thinks he is still at the hospital. Sometimes she says she misses him and wants to go back to the hospital and see him. The fact that she believes we left him there saddens me. I never left him alone there while he was alive. Even in death I could not leave him there. We carried him to the funeral home's waiting van before we left the hospital the evening he passed.

She is so crazy about babies, as all 2 year olds are. She doted on her little brother. "He's so tiny." "He's so cute." Every time someone talked about him that's what she'd say. She was supposed to be the big sister. The birth order is all screwed up now. Its just one of the things you'd never think of until something like this happens and you're alone with your thoughts. I wonder what it must be like to have another baby, when the baby gets to be older than the child you've lost, how that must feel. They'd have a big brother, but we'd only known him as a baby. He was THE BABY to us. Or losing an older child. I can't even imagine that kind of pain. I guess its hard no matter how you slice it. Its not the natural order of things.

In two days he would have been 6 months old. He would have been starting some solids. Growing out of sleepers. Rolling around on the carpet. Hanging on his big sisters' every word. I wish he was here so I could lie him down in the little bed that his sister and I put together for him. I just want to hold him again. I miss him. We all do.