Saturday, April 05, 2008

Here's a copy of an e-mail I sent to another friend today

They (the flowers) did arrive last night. Thank you SO much. Purple roses have always been my favorite roses, but I knew that you probably didn't know that, so it was extra touching to me that they were purple. Someone gave me a rose bush plant a few years ago, and it blooms purple roses, so now those roses will help remind me of him every Spring.

I feel so lost, which I know is normal, but I just don't know what to do with myself. I feel like I'm always going to feel so empty without him. I feel like I will always wonder what he would have been like, what he would have been doing. It seems like everyone I know who has lost a baby at this stage or after (which sadly, I know too many) they all went on to have another child afterwards. I don't want to have another, and I'm too old to have another, and I just couldn't make it through another pregnancy. And I don't think that people who have another child are doing it to replace the child that they lost, but I do think that it must help take at least a little of the pain away. And I will never have that. We will never have another child. We won't adopt. And really, all I want is Christopher back anyway.

I don't know what to do with my faith either. Last time I had a miscarriage, I was convinced that there was no God and there was no meaning to life. I gradually started feeling like there was a God and that there were parts of my faith that I did believe in. Not all of it, but enough to keep me going to church, and I felt like it was helping me live a good moral life, and teaching the children good values. And now this. I've prayed a lot over the years, and never felt like my prayers were answered. During this pregnancy, I prayed more than I have ever prayed before. At the beginning, I prayed "Please bless that this child is chromosomally normal, but if it is not, please let me lose it early." I know that it sounds awful to pray like that, but it is what I wanted. Then when there was the chromosome scare, I couldn't believe that it was happening, but I held on to the hope that I had been praying for me to lose it early if it was a chromosome problem, so maybe everything was o.k. And then he didn't have a chromosome problem. I thought that my prayers had been answered. For once. Even though I had never really felt there had been any connection when I was praying, even during this time that I had been praying so hard, he HAD been listening. I, of course, thanked him, but the next few days, I only prayed once a day. Until the day that I tried to find his heartbeat. Then I just kept praying "Please let him be o.k., please let him be o.k., please let him be o.k." And he wasn't o.k. I don't believe that God can change chromosomes, so if he had had trisomy 18, I don't believe that he could have fixed it, but I do (or maybe I did) believe that he could fix a placenta problem, or a heart problem. And he didn't. So here I feel stuck feeling like there probably is a God, and that there probably is a life after this one, and I feel like there are good values taught at my church, but I feel like that that God doesn't seem to care about me personally.

I almost can't believe that I have three living children. Knowing what I know now, it seems astounding that I was able to have any living children, much less three. And S, our only living child that came to us without any medical help. He is so amazing to me now. But sometimes I feel bad that I am feeling so low now about losing Christopher, when I have three children already.

I don't know. I could go on forever. I know that things will be less intense as the days go by. I know I will find a place where I miss him, but I'm not consumed by feelings of grief. But I'll never find that place where I get to have him back, and that pain just hurts SO much.

- Andie

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