Room

Less than one week. In less than a week from now (we have a C-Section schedule for September 2nd), we welcome another baby into our home, into our lives. It’s always striking to me how time continues forward, how one season is never here forever (although, I have just about had it with how long we’ve been simmering away here in August). It’s been two and a half years since we last brought a baby home and over three and a half since we welcomed our first baby. I feel like I say this a lot in regards to grief, but almost four years later, the same is true: A lot has changed and also nothing at all.

Our life and daily routines have continued on, evolving with the addition of a toddler to our world. Our home has slowly reflected the presence of a child that is here physically, as well as the presence of a child who is not. In a lot of ways, we’ve hit our stride in that regard. We have learned some of how to parent two children of such different natures. It’s hard. Really, really hard. But we are committed to being a family that includes everyone and so we’ve practiced. Let me be the first to say that everyone grieves and is entitled to grieve differently. Part of this is how we interact as a family and with our loved one and just because our family does it in certain ways does not mean that a family doing it in other ways is doing anything wrong. Anything. Grief, pardon my bluntness, just point blank sucks and everyone gets to do it in the way that feels most natural and genuine to them. For us, we practice how to be a family with some members here and some not on a daily basis.

This looks like a lot of different things. One year after Kamri died, we bought each of our families a tiny pink angel Christmas ornament with dark hair. We bought two for ourselves and not only does she get a spot on her very own pink tree (which you’ve probably seen), but she floats around the house and our cars throughout the rest of the year too. Holden currently has her on a shelf in his room and says “good night”, wanting to give her hugs and kisses before going to bed. When assigning “roles”, Kamri is always included. For example, in a picture of a bunch of animals, Holden will often say, “Daddy, you’re the…”, “Mommy, you’re the…” and we follow it up with “which one is Holden?” and “which one is Kamri?”. When we practice whose birthday is in what month, Holden has learned that his is in February and Kamri’s is in December. The little pink elephant pacifier (we call them “Wubby” around here after the brand, “Wubbanub” that makes them), Holden refers to as “Kamri’s wubby” and we’ve never seen him with it in his own mouth. She is included in our Halloween costumes each year, making her debut as “Bo Peep” in the Toy Story gang two years ago and the “fish” in our rendition of “Down By the Bay” (Holden’s favorite song at the time) last year. When Holden asks where Kamri is, he can often answer his own question with “Kamri’s in heaven? with Jesus?”. We find him playing in her room often, sometimes with us, sometimes all on his own.

He calls it “Kamri’s room” and every so often, “Kamri and Jesus’s room”. The other week, I asked him if he had any dreams during his nap and he replied with “I dreamed about Kamri”, then paused and said more to himself than to me, “Kamri’s so pretty”. We all give the small picture of her in our room kisses and say “good morning, Kam” and “good night, Kam” or “hey, Kam” as we walk by. Sometimes we hear Holden say, “I love you, sweet girl”, like he hears us say so often. Kamri is a part of our family and we treat her as such, doing our best to help Holden understand who she is and learn and decide for himself how he can and wants to engage with his sister.

One of the most subtle, but also very prominent nods to our girl is the presence of pink in our house. I decorate with a lot of blues and pinks in general, but beyond that, the color is grounding in some way. It’s a silent reminder that she is ours and we have the power to put happy reminders of her in as many places as we want.

This is where it starts to get harder, where the lines of things we’ve gotten “good” at and the territory we haven’t had the courage to even approach start to blur. For four years, there has been a sweet, quiet room in our house, set apart from the noise and the day-t0-day of the rest of our world. It’s our sanctuary, our safe space, the room where we go when we want to just be with her. Kamri’s room has become the most treasured room of our home. The day after she died, Mitch and I came home, completely stripped down to shells of people wracked with exhaustion, emptiness, and the realization that our “homecoming” was nothing like we ever imagined it would be. We came in the door after spending the night she passed away at my parents house, walked straight back to her room, laid on the floor and sobbed. We wept in complete devastation, curling up on her fluffy white rug, desperate for any feeling of relief. Anything at all that would make the pain hurt just a little less.

It didn’t happen that night. Or the next. Those first few months were the darkest of dark days and nights for us. But we kept her door open. That was a decision we made from the very start; however much pain it would cause us to walk by or enter in, knowing she wasn’t in there and never would be, we would not shut that room off from the rest of our lives and we would not shut her out of the rest of our lives. So her door has been open for the last four years and God has used her beautiful space to give us rest and respite when we’ve needed it most.

We’ve both done a lot of grief work in that room, together and individually. On her birthday, we spend a lot of time in there together, just being with her. Each of us find ourselves in there on our own, Mitch often to play guitar by her crib and me to sit in her rocker and snuggle into her blanket. Sometimes these moments are sorrowful and the tears flow, but just as often, it’s just part of our “one on one” time with our daughter, filled with peace and a calming joy that comes from spending time with her. We have always loved being with Kamri, we are just parents that have had to navigate what it looks and feels like to “be” with her when she’s not here.

That’s what makes this next chapter so excruciatingly painful in so many ways. Kamri’s room is changing. She’s going to be sharing it with our new son. This is one of those steps of grief that we did not anticipate, or rather, never pushed ourselves to come to terms with in all of the last four years. This is where grief smacks us in the face, reminding us that it will always be here. There will always be waves that come crashing in that make it hard to breathe, no matter how long it’s been. Over the last four years, we have worked and fought our way through so many of those waves, but this is a reminder that no matter how old we get and how much time has passed, we will continue to come across new pain points of the journey.

We have grappled with how to celebrate Kamri’s birthday. We have learned what it feels like to describe to our two-year-old-Holden where Kamri is and hear him repeat it back. His sister is with Jesus in heaven. We know the joy and pain of listening to “Take Me Home, Country Roads” and even moreso, hearing Holden sing every word of it, pausing after the first few notes to say, “this is Kamri’s song”. We are familiar with the pang of heartbreak we feel every time we see a little girl her age and have learned to accept the stab of pain we still feel every time we watch friends and family interact with their daughters. We know that the minutes from 7:00 to 7:25pm on January 20th we will always be silent and still, as we wait with baited breath just like we did the night four years ago to see if she would stay with us or run to Jesus. These are all bridges we’ve crossed over the last years.

We have not thought about what her first day of Kindergarten will feel like. We have not experienced her graduation year. We have not reached the point in time that she may have walked down the aisle or had children of her own. We have not touched the bins of clothes we so carefully saved away for her, labeled with all of the different ages of the infant and toddler years. We have not considered what it would feel like to have to cover the most beautiful pink ceiling of the bedroom we so carefully put together for our daughter.

This is new and it hurts so very deeply. Never in my life did I think we would be doing this. Creating a room for a child and then changing that room without ever getting to see that child in it. It’s hard to describe the pain that comes with that. My heart keeps crying out, even four years later, “this is not fair. God, don’t you see, don’t you know how much this hurts?” It’s also hard to describe the fear. What will happen when the room looks different? How much of Kamri’s space and place in this house will be lost? What will it feel like for the entire function of that room to shift from the sanctuary it has been for us all of these years? What will we call the room now? How can we ever call it anything but “Kamri’s room”? And I cannot stop the tears as I type this next one… Where will I go when I want to be with her? Where will we go when we want to be surrounded by her things, her colors, her keepsakes… just… her? At the end of the day, we just miss her. We miss her so deeply and things like this just put a spotlight on all of the aspects of grief we seemingly have a grasp on in our everyday life. The truth is, they’re all still there; we’ve learned how to exist and co-exist with them, but all of the emotions are as real today as they were the day she died. I wish she could have seen her room. I wish so very much that I could have held her in that chair and snuggled her in that blanket, that Mitch could have played along to her clapping or quietly as she slept. It still hurts.

As you can imagine, this has been a very slow process. There have been nights where the grief feels so much like those early months as we think about what it will feel like to take down the things on her walls, take out her blankets and little girl stuffed animals, and hardest of all, cover that sweet pink ceiling. We’ve never pushed ourselves to be okay with any of it, with Kamri not being here, with our family being split across life here on Earth and in Eternity. We’ve never expected each other or ourselves to walk this path without allowing the feelings of anger, hurt, betrayal, and sorrow to come in and take up space when they need to. The one thing we have determined is that we will keep moving. We will continue through it and keep walking forward, however small those steps may be at some points. And so we are doing that now… we are embracing the pain of change, but also the beauty of new life as we welcome a baby that is so very loved by all of us into our home. For us, that means allowing our home to evolve and include every single family member. So we are doing the hard work because if Kamri taught us nothing else, she taught us to be brave and to trust God.

Along with the hard moments of this process, there have been several stunningly beautiful ones. God is so faithful in his peace and gentle guidance and although there have been nights of tear-stained cheeks as time to make the changes continues to approach, there has also been a sun-filled, exciting anticipation of taking on our newest challenge as parents: our first siblings that will share room.

We have done a few things to make the transition as easy and fulfilling as we possibly can. I share this because I wonder if somewhere, sometime, there may be another set of parents who wish there was a book on grief that addressed the grittiest of logistical questions like, “what do you do when the child you lost is a girl, but the child that is coming is a boy?”. We made the decision that this process would be two-fold for us: honoring Kamri’s room as is and pushing ourselves to transform the room to what will be.

The first step in doing this was a mixture of therapeutic and heartbreaking. We finished her room. Hung every last thing we had collected for her space and never put up. Deep cleaned every corner and dusted every surface. I styled her bookshelf and arranged her dresser with all of the sweet, little girl pieces I had stored away for her. We made the final touches last week, not caring that within the next days, things would change. We finished her room for her. After that, my sister-in-law came over, gifted us with her talented photography, and went to work capturing every little detail of Kamri’s room. Her bed, her blankets, her animals, the pink shutters I all but trash picked all of those years ago because I thought it would be so cool to hang them on the wall in a nursery, the sign of her name that was hand-drawn by my cousin, the artwork I bought at Hobby Lobby after she died because it was so perfect for her room, the white fluffy rug, and…. the pink ceiling. It’s all there. She captured every inch of the space that has been so special to us for so many years.

And then we went in one last time as a family before anything changed and just spent time in there together with Kamri. As is, no make-up, poses, or staging. Holden in his underwear because he didn’t want to put on anything else. Just together in her room, as we’ve loved it all of these years.

With those pictures taken, a release and relief began… some of the questions about “how will we remember what it looked and felt like?” and “what if we want to see it as hers again?” quieted and in their place, the knowledge and assurance that we have now done everything within our power to fully experience Kamri in her room settled in. We left no stone un-turned and no regrets on the table as we transition the room from one season to the next. That is a good feeling. A peaceful feeling. In doing so, we have opened the door to being able to move forward and allow change.

That’s the next step… changing the room. It will look differently, function differently, and probably feel a little different from how it has felt the last four years. We are keeping a lot of pieces the same (her furniture, rug, curtains), but are also pushing ourselves over the mental hurdle of making some changes too. My brother installed a fresh, new fan in place of the one that has been there since we moved in. That night, after the pictures were taken, we made (what felt like) the brave and bold move to switch up the layout and move the furniture and as a result, have a new look that we love just as much with all of the same “stuff”. A few days later, we added another rug to go with the fluffy, white one. I ordered a new side table and foot rest to switch things up. And finally, we’ve been working up the courage to finally cover the pink ceiling. We’ve decided to go the removable wallpaper route because it walks the balance of the healthy mental exercise of forward motion, while also giving us the grace of “keeping” the pink, should we ever want it back, all the while knowing it’s still there in some way.

We are living a full life; one that encompasses the tragic and sorrowful moments and is also striving to allow the beauty to have its spot too. The room was beautiful as Kamri’s. It will be beautiful as she shares it with her brother. We are going to rest in the peace that comes when we allow both to be true.

Jesus, thank you for your gentleness. Thank you for holding our hearts as we work through the hard things here on Earth. We love you so much and cannot WAIT to be with you in Eternity. 

Kamri, you are so loved and treasured. Thank you for sharing with your brothers, thank you for showing up for them in ways that they can see and understand you. We miss you every single day and cannot WAIT to see how you have decided to decorate your room in heaven. We love you, sweet girl.

PS. If you’re looking for our other posts on the grief process you can find them here: How Are We Doing?, Anger, Trust, Hurt, Realness, Six/Seven/Eight, Pregnant with Holden, Coping with ristmas, “Kam-uary”, Fear, Disbelief, Well.