Happy 9th birthday darling Bella

by Recover the gift

Baby girl, our precious Bella

Today is your 9th birthday. How is that even possible? I miss you so very very much.

I woke up with this very heavy feeling this morning. In fact I have had a very heavy feeling for about 10 days now, knowing that today was coming. But this morning particularly I woke up being so aware of how our morning would be different if you were still with us. We would be waking up our precious 9 year old daughter with presents and balloons and celebrating the whole day! You would be taking treats for your birthday ring for your grade 3 classmates. It would most likely be your birthday party this weekend where we would celebrate you again in the way you had chosen. What would you look like now? What would your likes and dislikes be? How would you have wanted to be celebrated? What would your relationship be like with your precious brother? The questions are endless, the wandering almost suffocating. I keep on thinking that as the years pass it will get easier, but it doesn’t ever seem to get easier to be honest.

I listened to a We Can Do Hard Things podcast about grief yesterday and one part particularly resonated with me. Glennon said – “when grief comes we have a tendency to go to our head, “if i can make this mean something for myself or for somebody else, then its fixed” – instead of letting ourselves really really feel. To allow ourselves the simplicity of a feeling “I AM SO SAD”, we have to let it sink down into our bodies to really allow the processing to happen rather than it being in our brain.”

And this is so so me. If I can “silver line” our grief, make your and your brothers death “mean” something and not be in vain, then somehow it’s going to be okay. I try to rationalise so many things in my head, to turn it into a list of things to do, goals to achieve, to somehow try to make sense of it all. Instead of letting myself really feel, to own truly what is emotionally going on, how deeply sad and devastated I sometimes feel without having to make it all okay. I try to “human doing” it away instead of allowing myself to lean into my “human being” – to truly just feel the depth of my feelings.

It’s almost like I am too scared to lean into what I truly feel inside my being for the fear that it might actually break me if I consider the depth of it all. I know in my head that it won’t, but in my heart it feels too hard and scary.

So Belsie, how do I truly feel the full extent of my sadness in our loss of you, on that day with the physical loss of you, and in every day that has passed since, mourning all the “could have beens”, every loss since simply because you are no longer here.

For today – no silver lining it – I feel deeply sad, somewhat lost, scared to allow myself to feel how broken I really might be. My body- the feeling in my chest – physically mourns that you are no longer here, wishing I could reach out and hold you one more time.

I hold onto the fact that my memory of this day 9 years ago is still so so strong! That I remember so much of that day and can relish in these memories. What a delightful, incredible little girl you were. How blessed and privileged we were to have you be ours for 7.5 months. That you chose us as your family. A friend of mine this morning asked me to tell her about you, and what a gift that was. To actually be invited to talk about you. The occurrence is far too rare. I should invite that into my life more.

My darling child, happy 9th birthday to you. How I wish you were here with us to celebrate you.

I love you now, and forever.

Always your mom