New Years hit me hard. I have been in a fog for a few weeks, unable to make sense of the mess of emotions that go on in my mind. My family got me into a writing class for those dealing with grief. All of my creative juices have been channeled into that course since Jan 7, so my blog has taken the back burner.

I have had a few people ask me if I am continuing with my writing, wondering if there was a reason for my silence. No reason. Often when I find the time, I choose to nap instead. Or evenings where Nathan would watch a movie and I would type, instead we go in the hot tub. No complaints!

We are coming up on the six-month anniversary of that awful day. I cannot describe how this boggles my mind the way it does. She was just here. Her nursery still remains the same, diapers lined up, clothing in drawers. But on the other hand, I feel like this journey has been my entire existence. Who was I before this?! I’ve lost touch with so much. Again, a hard concept to explain. I assume it is like those who have a conversion experience later in life. People remember them before they became a Christian, expect them to be like their old self, then become confused by this new person before them. What changed? Well, everything! You cannot be the same once you commit your life to God, and neither can I after such an experience.

For a time, I felt like I just didn’t have a place in society. No one understood my pain, people didn’t know how to respond, and I had not a clue how to carry on. Early on I became exhausted trying to express myself, wounded trying to defend myself, and defeated attempting to resolve myself. The underlying conundrum is what people don’t know, they can’t possibly know! And regardless of my frustrations, I ultimately envied their ignorance.

When you lose a child, an infant, it’s painfully personal – intimate even. Inside me for 9 months, and as good as bound to me for 3 months. Eden was an extension of my body, she was (is) part of me. To recognize the fact that Eden is ‘on the other side’ – this knowledge leaves me lost in an abyss. If my own little Eden no longer exists in a physical form, in the same realm as me, I too couldn’t possibly belong here.

Planted between two worlds, one I am not yet called to, the other I no longer desire.

I cannot remember how much I have shared about the book Imagine Heaven by John Burke, but I read it cover to cover in record time. Never had I been so captivated by stories of those longing to go back to the heaven that they witnessed through a near death experience. It gives a powerful glimpse into what we should all be fixed on. What comes next. I don’t think I have ever had such a powerful connection to a concept once completely foreign to me.

Before Eden passed away there was a certain amount of mystery surrounding the topic of death. Coffins and burials, viewing a body – all a mystified secret. That vanishes when it is your own baby. I held her body for as long as they let me and placed her back in the little box. I watched the funeral director slowly and respectfully close the lid and swing the little lock closed. That was it. She was in there. Nothing creepy. It was my baby, and I had control. Still her mother, I assumed that role to her human form until the last moments. I couldn’t control what happened to our family, so I did what I was able to do to regain control where I could. No one was taking her from me, I placed her in her casket willingly, and we offered her tiny and perfect body back to the earth. I even opened the casket again, very quickly at the burial. I just wanted to peek at her, like when I would peek through her nursery door during her naps.

Yep, still there.

Things are always more painful when they are happening to you. The surrender of control is often the source of all pain. I think of preparing for my first childbirth experience. I would recite mantras like “My body was designed for this.” “I know where this pain is coming from.” “I am in control.” “Pain cannot kill me.” “I was created to DO THIS!!” I cannot tell you how much this helped me. To maintain a sense of control in labor takes away the element of fear, and ultimately takes away the source of pain!

I guess what I am trying to explain is that, in the midst of a nightmare where I was stripped of my right to control what was happening to my baby, I found solace in the minor things where I was able to gain control and still feel like I was her mom.

When your baby is alive, parents have all the rights. I can vaccinate or choose not to. I can home school or choose public school. I name them, choose what to feed them and teach them. Circumcision, ear piercing, and a million other things. As parents we have that right to choose. As soon as Eden was gone, all that went out the window.

When the coroner came, I insisted that I go with Eden. “That would be impossible.” They didn’t even tell me exactly where they were taking her!! The next day they told me she was enroute to Kamloops for an autopsy! Three hours away! I don’t want her on the highway, I don’t want her far from me. I don’t even want to think about what they do to her in an autopsy.

I just felt like screaming, NOOOO! Give her back! She is MINE! Stop all this madness!!! Luckily, we have a funeral home 30 seconds from our house and the same day she had the autopsy, she was driven all the way back to Abbotsford, just down the street. I was happy about that. I just wanted to know that she was close.

Anyways, back to the idea of being planted between two worlds. I feel a sense of having had a glimpse of a life beyond the veil. It’s a profound and yet very lonely place to be. I don’t quite know what to do about it. On days where I am so deeply distracted by my life on Earth, that what remains, I feel all wrong. My distractions are huge. A two and three-year-old – I need not explain my feelings of forever drowning. (They are great, I love them… blah blah blah) But those times where I am distracted from that place I discovered beyond the veil, I feel physically and spiritually disconnected.

If I am honouring Eden, and grieving her holistically, I am not being 100% available to Aspen and Cambria. Yet when I am fully engaged in my girls, I feel like I am failing Eden, unable to integrate her into my life.

I am torn between two worlds.