Loving a Child that No Longer Lives

My little Lachlan Jon.  He was a sweet baby.  He did all the wonderful and perfectly ordinary things that a baby should do—all those little things that make every parent bumble with pride. 

He loved his big brother and some of my favorite memories are of watching the two of them together. Lachlan would often just sit quietly watching, and soaking in the world around him, but when he wasn’t doing that, he was mastering the art of the tease.  He loved to reach out and grab a fist full of his big brother’s hair just to see what kind of reaction he could get.  Or he would sit near the landing of the stairs, looking at us, waiting to make eye contact, then the second he knew he had our attention, he would flash a mischievous smile and make a dash for the top of the stairs, laughing with glee at the power he had to make us drop everything to save him from a tumble down the stairs.  Oh, he thought that was great fun!

We were living the beautiful ordinary life of having a baby and the relishing in the love that was exchanged with the people around him.

But what does it look like to love a child that is no longer here?

A human being, an eternal soul, and the love between a mother and child cannot be entirely encapsulated in what happens in the physical realm, but our physical bodies are the way we are most accustomed to giving and receiving that love.  Our bodies are the tool we have to communicate ourselves to the people around us.  We show our children our love by giving them hugs and kisses, by snuggling them tight, by feeding and dressing and bathing them. 

How do you love a child when their physical body is not here to have and to hold? 

How do you keep them close when there are no more shared experiences in a physical world of time and space?   

When a body and soul are separated, we step into a new realm of learning how to love and connect to a world that is beyond what we can see, and hear, and touch. 

It is inevitable that time will erode the details of memory, but it cannot erode what is eternal.  It cannot erode him from my heart and soul. 

My connection to Lachlan has shifted to become less about the memories of him (while those are still important too) and more about the essence of him. I cannot love the things that he does, so I am left to just love him.

He is still every bit as much a part of me as my other children are, but I connect to him in a different way. 

I find him in the stillness.  I talk to him in my heart--and often feel his wisdom, his love, and his reassurance. 

This nonphysical connection will never be entirely satisfying to a physical being.  But this nonphysical love shows us something profound. It demonstrates the permanence of the love between a parent and child, and it also leaves me with a hopeful longing for that Christian promise of resurrection. This permanent love drives me to hold onto the hope that His promise is true, which would mean that one day, I’ll be able to show Lachlan my love again in both body and soul. 

On that day, I’ll scoop him into my arms, playfully nuzzle my face into his neck, and rejoice when I hear the sound of his laughter.

The Changes in our Grief Happen So Gradually its Hard to Even Notice Them

This series began as a social media project for Infant Loss Awareness Month. I am going to re-work it just a little to make it fitting to re-tell on the blog.

I remember attending some support groups shortly after my son died, and seeing others in these groups who were now many years out from their loss, still grieving in a pretty intense way.  When I was so fresh in my grief, and still in a place that it still took intentional effort to simply breathe, it was overwhelming to think I’d feel the same way three, or five, or ten years later.

And now, I am going to offer you the gift of my hindsight. I am sitting 12 years out from having to say goodbye to Lachlan. While I still long for him and miss his presence every single day, the intensity of my grief is nothing like it was in the beginning. 

In the words of the good C.S. Lewis, “There was no sudden, striking, and emotional transition.  Like the warming of a room or the coming of daylight, when you first notice them they have already been going on for some time.”  “Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back everything is different?”

This is the story of grief. Day by day, nothing changes, but looking back on my last 12 years, everything is different.

While I cannot give any timeline of when the shift has happened, my goal for this series is going to be both a look into what my grief felt like in its early days, and a reflection of how that grief feels now.  I hope it is a window into the soul of a grieving mama that both acknowledges the depths of pain that have been traversed and that it will bring a ray of hope to knowing that it’s possible to live again with a peaceful and happy heart.