Disbelief

Oh my… there is so much to say about these last few weeks. Today, Holden is officially 24 days old. While we rejoice in this, it is not lost on us that tomorrow, he will have officially surpassed Kamri in days lived on this earth. Kamri lived for 24 days before she snuggled safely and warmly into Jesus’ arms for eternity. Remember how we’ve been saying that grief is like a ball of knotted up strings? A journey that winds and turns and twists down into valleys and up onto mountaintops? A process that is never ending, but always evolving? It’s still true. As we knew it would be, grief is woven into who we are for the rest of our lives. For it, we are different, deeper, and even fuller versions of ourselves. We experience the sorrows and pains of this life more deeply, but we also experience the joys more deeply as well.

So yes, today is both. Joy and sorrow together.

One thing we are learning pretty tangibly is that one of the effects of grief on a person’s life is a certain amount of disbelief moving forward. Holden is currently sitting in his chair on the floor next to me, blowing bubbles and snoozing away. Clearly, Kamri taught him some of her best tricks because he’s very well versed in bubble blowing, side eye, and the scrunchy face. His chair is brightly colored- teal and green and red- with a stuffed elephant and toucan hanging just in front of his face. We’ve uniquely named them “Toukey” and “Ellie”… his friends. I can see him here. I can here his breathing and the occasional squeak when he stirs. I can see the chair, see the colors. I can reach over and touch him, even. He’s got smooth skin and soft, dark hair, just like Kam. Holden is here, right in front of me, and yet… sometimes I don’t believe it.

That’s what we’re finding… all of these dreams that have lived in our minds and hearts for so long are beginning to be realized and we’re still not completely buying that it’s real. More importantly and more heartwrenching… that it’s not going away.

I’m still waiting for someone to come to our front door and tell us that it’s time to give him back, that he can’t stay forever. When we walked out of the hospital, Mitch carrying his car seat (such a victorious experience in and of itself), we kept looking around, thinking… “Isn’t someone going to stop us? Are we allowed to just take him out? Don’t they know we aren’t the family that takes our kid home?”

A few days after coming home, Holden had his first doctor’s appointment. The people there are very nice, but it feels foreign. In our world, the doctors and nurses know us, know our story, and have become close friends… the kind you consider part of your family. We had a lot of that family surrounding us throughout our birth experience with Holden because they all cleared their schedules to be a part of it. When your male gynecologist, operating team, and nursing staff greets you and your husband, parents, and siblings with hugs and kisses each time they see you, you know you’ve become family. In our world, we all talk about Kamri as we would talk about any of our other children and we don’t have to explain because they already know… they were there for it last year. But this doctors’ office is different. It’s the pediatrician; somewhere we never quite made it with Kamri. They don’t know who we are and don’t know where we’ve been, nor do we they.

Our doctor finishes the appointment, saying, “I mean, we’re looking at a healthy kid here!”… to which both Mitch and I wanted to urge him to keep looking because that’s not possible. You must have missed something or there must be a caveat because there is always a caveat. He’s healthy, BUT… where’s the other half of the sentence because in no experience of ours has that statement simply ended with a period.

We have found that this is something we’re going to need to continue to process and continue to work through… just another piece of string in that tangled ball of grief. I think that part of the journey of grief is relearning what the plumb line is. The status quo.

A few nights ago, Holden was having a rough go of it. He was clearly uncomfortable… not screaming, but the look on his face was almost worse. He was in pain. Every so often his eyes would get a little glazed, like they were welling up to cry, and he would grimace as if the wave of pain had come crashing in. This went on for hours. We held him, burped him, rocked him, everything. The longer it went on, the harder it got for us emotionally and mentally. Eventually, we texted the doctor (who so generously gives his personal number out to patients) and were slightly comforted by his lack of alarm. We now think it was just a bad case of gas. At the time, though, neither of us could hide from each other the terror swirling around our minds. We realized then and there that we are not normal parents because normal parents don’t go right to, “Is my child going to live or die tonight?” We have seen pain and helplessness in our child before and that was always the question at the end of the day. Our status quo has been defined and it will take a long time to learn that not all experiences will end the same way that ours did with Kamri. Disbelief.

In some ways (and on a lighter note), disbelief has helped us to take in as much of our son as humanly possible. When you live with the understanding that nothing is assured… time, health, life… the appreciation for such increases dramatically. We are LOVING being Holden and Kamri’s parents. Our son is a blast of air after a long year of fighting to breathe. We are soaking him in, every part of him, because that’s what we have yearned to do for so long. In that way, a healthy dose of disbelief seems helpful in the way of not taking a single moment for granted.

Satan likes to use grief to instill a disbelief that joy and hope exist, even in the darkest hour. Grief can make it feel like this is all that there is. There is only sorrow, sickness, pain, and suffering. This is the new normal and there will never be some of the beauty that your life once had. I think this is where the “healthy dose” of disbelief ends and the lies of Satan begin. There is, in fact, healing and beauty and happiness and joy again. In fact, we’ve experienced all of those things even throughout this last year, even before Holden was born. I have thoughts on what joy looks like in the middle of the dark, but that’s another post for another day. For now, we will be gracious with ourselves. It is ok to feel amounts of disbelief, as they are scars of the wounds we will always wear. Our disbelief will never cross the threshold into distrust in God because even in the worst, He has proven Himself faithful and loving. But we are human and so we take it one day at a time, one gas bubble at a time. 🙂

Holden is 24 days old and tomorrow, he will be 25 days old. Kamri is doing eternal cartwheels in heaven and visiting her brother in his dreams… we know this because he is constantly smiling as he sleeps. They are God’s and they are ours and we will continue to rest in that beautiful truth.

PS. Thank you for all of your love and prayers these last few weeks! We have some pictures and memories we can’t wait to share with you about Holden’s first month… we’ll probably share them around his one month birthday. I also have some thoughts regarding the blog… what this space has been over the years, this last year, and what it might look like moving forward, so stay tuned. We love you, KamFam… all four of us. <3