Still Learning

I'm still learning about this thing called grief and what it means.

This week I had a goal to clean out our Liza Jane's closet. It's the last thing in her room that I haven't gone through. All of her clothes were in there, neatly organized by her Mimi more than two years ago when we arranged her room in anticipation of her birth.

She never made it out of the Newborn size sleepers and into the 0-3 month size, partly because her heart condition made it difficult to eat and gain weight.

All the baby clothes she never got to wear were just one more reminder that her precious life was ended far too soon. As I folded a sweet little pair of jammies with colorful hearts on it, I cried because she never made it into the three month size range.

I remembered the stages of grief when I was six months pregnant and we learned that she had Down syndrome. People with Down syndrome tend to be small for their age, even without a heart condition. So would she have gotten big enough to fit into that three month sleeper before the weather got too warm for her to wear it? I will never know.

This task of cleaning her closet is a very necessary one, because we are in the process of adopting a sibling group of children. We don't know yet who our future children will be, but we are actively going through a matching process. And the room that was Liza's needs to be ready for our children.

Last night we had a beautiful snowfall. I had a rough time last night after meeting a friend's newborn baby for the first time yesterday. All the feelings of anger, rage, and deep sorrow came rushing back.

The tree in our front yard, covered in snow.

Ordinarily, snow like this gives me a giddy, happy childhood feeling. I waltz around the house singing "Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow," while making cups of hot tea. This time, though, I felt I was clinging onto a shred of my former self. I was sad, I was depressed, I could hardly function.

So, I'm still learning what it means to grieve the loss of a child. Tuesday will be two years since she died, and sometimes the loss is still fresh, as if it happened yesterday. She just didn't have enough time. I didn't have enough time to love her, to be Liza Jane's mommy. The pain is still there, churning in the core of my being. And it is still hard.