The Good Old Days

It's been a while since I last posted and truthfully it's because I just haven't felt like it.  I've either been feeling too much or too little to want to write about any of it.  But here I am in my third trimester with an induction date scheduled and I'm realizing Everly's birth and death are near approaching.  Admittedly, in the beginning I did a lot of pretending it wasn't happening.  There was some #livingforEverly but there was also quite a bit of #livingforme which sometimes meant pushing thoughts of Everly aside.  In our first meeting with our therapist I remember telling her I knew suppressing my feelings was a bad way to cope because at some point all those feelings were going to come spilling out of me like some kind of emotional avalanche.  Surprisingly though, she assured me otherwise.  She said I didn't need to force myself to feel, because when I needed to feel, life would force me to feel.  She said there would be natural occurrences as the birth approached that would surface the emotions that needed surfacing.  And how right she was.

This past month has brought several big and dozens of small triggers that had me feeling everything I had been trying so hard not to feel.  With the induction date approaching and a small chance I don't even make it to that date, Matt and I realized it was time to get serious about burial plans.  So with the help of our dear friends making Everly's casket, we worked on some finishing touches like picking out fabric for the lining and an inscription for the plaque.  For the most part, I made it through these conversations without a tear shed but one day I got a text as I was leaving the mall and barely made it to my car before bursting into tears.  Then roughly 60 seconds later I was wiping those tears and on with the rest of my day.  It sounds crazy.  And it is crazy.  Truly, I have never felt more psychotic than I have over the last month.  But that's grief for you.  I guess everyone grieves differently but that's my version of it.

With the casket figured out, we went on to pick a cemetery.  I'm pretty sure one of the most horrible places on the planet is the portion of the cemetery dedicated to infants and children.  In the consultation I was all business but once we started to tour the grounds and we stood in front of the infant graves I was crushed.  Crushed for us, but also crushed for all the other families that had to lose their little ones.  

And then we picked out a mortuary.  

And then, after a week of jam-packed burial prepping, I attended a baby shower for a friend whose baby girl is due just weeks after Everly.  I really don't want to send the wrong message here...  I've actually attended a few baby showers already since Everly's diagnosis and I've been totally OK.  Strangely enough, our situation hasn't made me jealous toward others with healthy babies or babies-to-be.  It hasn't even made me wonder "why me? why us? why her?"  I've been able to accept our situation as ours and trust it is part of God's very intentional plan for our family.  Which is why I can watch the handful of close friends I have with babies on the way and feel genuinely happy for them.  I can hold babies and not wish they were mine.  I can even happily attend baby showers and celebrate the arrival of babies more fortunate than mine.  Just not that week.  After surviving a week of planning the death of my child it was really difficult to then quickly switch gears to celebrate the birth of another child.  For the first time it was hard not to entertain thoughts of what could have been.  

And just when I thought we had seen it all, we received news that our close friends had unexpectedly lost their baby at just 23 weeks gestation.  We were able to be at the hospital after their birth, which was a very sacred experience.  But it was also a very sobering experience.  It was hard to look at them without seeing us, just two months from now.  My heart ached for them, knowing they were feeling everything we were feeling, only probably heavily magnified given they hadn't had time to prepare and they were living through the actual death of their child, which for us is still to come.  I genuinely wish that our situation with Everly could somehow make our loved ones exempt from having to experience anything of the kind.  And naively, I sort of thought/hoped/assumed it would work this way.  So when we received the news I was shocked it was happening at all and absolutely floored that it was happening to them before it had happened to us.  I will say, as much as I wished things had gone differently for this sweet family, I am eternally grateful for the faith filled example they are setting for Matt and I.  We watch them in awe and hope and pray to handle things with even a fraction of the strength and grace that they have shown.

Strangely, amidst all the heartache of these last few weeks, I have also felt so much gratitude.  At different times, in different circumstances and in different phrasing, the thought keeps coming to me that these days, as tough as they are, are "the good old days."  I just keep feeling like one day, when I look back at this time in our life, I will remember the pain and fear or Everly's diagnosis but I honestly believe that I will feel just as powerfully a really happy kind of nostalgia associated with every other aspect of our lives.  It would be so easy to define our life by what is going wrong because let's be honest...that part of life is going really, really wrong.  But that's just it.  That is one part of our life.  But there's this other part of our life where we enjoy a strong and supportive marriage.  We also have the part of our life with a spunky 20 month old who, though very challenging at times, makes us smile and laugh and melt into a big, giant puddle of infatuation on a daily basis.  We have another part of our life where our family listens to us vent, cheers us on, and shares the burden of our hurt with us.  And then there are our friends who, to my amazement, have gone above and beyond in their assignment of keeping us distracted and happy.  We live in an incredibly beautiful place where beach days in February are possible.  We have a comfortable (cozy) apartment that we love coming home to...even if we wished it was slightly bigger ;)  Matt has a great job and I am privileged enough to stay home and play the part of 24/7 BFF to my tiny human Harvey.  

So as easy as it is for me to look at my life and see the negative, it is just as easy, if I look outside of the complications in this pregnancy, to see how incredibly blessed I am.  Not only would I be ungrateful to focus on the challenges alone, I'd be missing out on so many opportunities for happiness.  The time since Everly's diagnosis has been a mixed bag of emotions but many of those emotions are peace and joy and gratitude.  We have made so many memories during this time that I cherish but those memories wouldn't exist had we decided to write this time off as one of just mourning and sadness.  

Recently I was going back and listening to former talks from our new prophet, President Nelson and I I came across one that really resonated with me.  In October 2016 he gave a talk in General Conference titled "Joy and Spiritual Survival" and while I'm tempted to copy-paste the entire goldmine of a talk here, I'll just share this one excerpt: 

Just as the Savior offers "peace that passeth all understanding," He also offers an intensity, depth, and breadth of joy that defy human logic or mortal comprehension.  For example, it doesn't seem possible to feel joy when your child suffers with an incurable illness or when you lose your job or when your spouse betrays you.  Yet that is precisely the joy the Savior offers.  His joy is constant, assuring us that our afflictions shall be but a small moment and be consecrated to our gain.

I strongly believe that a big part of the joy we will experience during our trials will come from gratitude for the many blessings that have still been afforded us.  

Just someone please remind me of this 2 months from now, k?