Watching TV last night, my son saw a commercial for the new movie Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I didn’t even realize he was watching it until he looked up at me and said “Mommy, that boy’s dad died.” I could feel that tightness in my chest… not even my chest really. It’s like a knot in my heart. I reminded him that people usually die when they are old. That children’s’ daddies don’t usually die. That babies don’t usually die. That it is very unusual.

That knot in my heart has come up a lot with my son lately. Saying prayers about a week ago, my husband told him that he could pray for another baby brother or baby sister someday, if he wanted to. I wondered what he would say and expected some of his earlier responses about “fixing it” or maybe that he already had a baby sister. Instead, he stood up on the bed and looking at us both said that he would pray for another baby and that he would pray that this baby would be very powerful. Then he threw his little hands down and said “And this baby will not die”. We were a little stunned that he had come to understand some of the permanence about her death…at least that she wasn’t coming back…. but it let us inside his head a little bit more. We realized that since he didn’t understand the details of the cord accident, he was putting his own ideas together. As a three year old, he thinks that if you die, you must not be strong so if another baby is powerful it won’t die. A few days later he talked about the idea again. He told us that someday he wants a sister, but not a brother. Then he looked at me and said emphatically that he did not want the baby in my tummy, that he just wanted it to be at our house. It took me a second to get it, but since we told him “there was an accident in mommy’s tummy” he had decided that, again, if it’s not in my tummy that an accident can be prevented.

Although we talk about his sister openly and we always will, I’m glad that we brought up this idea of another baby with him. It opened up a door for us to what he thinking about death and made us realize it has been on his mind. He is starting to think in concrete terms and reason in his own way through this problem. Sharing these things with my mother she was so happy that he is expressing his feelings to which I agreed but added that it is breaking my heart to talk about these things with a three year old. But, we didn’t really have a choice and I know that it is better for him to verbalize these thoughts, rather to try to figure them out in his own head when he doesn’t have the knowledge to do it. Trust me, if I had a choice, I would rather be having these questions come up later….about a goldfish…. but that option was taken away from all of us.

I wonder a lot how this experience will influence him. It scares me and I pray to God that he will help us to have the right words, to do the right things that will have a positive effect on my poor son. It is just so hard to tell. I am still seeing ways that this has affected me, both positively and negatively and I know I will continue to see them. The most hurtful and shocking to me though came the other night. My son was saying how much he loved us and he looked so cute that I asked my husband to take a video of him talking about it and while he was taping I was looking at my darling son and I thought “we will want this when he is gone.” It was so shocking to me that I shut the thought out immediately, and it was so upsetting that I can hardly write the words now. That I could even think such a thing was so hurtful and scary, but the next night when I finally told my husband about it with tears in my eyes, he shook his head and told me that he had had the exact same thought. We have both experienced loss before and wouldn’t consider ourselves too green in that area. We are both strong and I know I have suffered through several trials before this….. but this…. this has ripped the rug out from under me so hard that I can’t even see straight sometimes. It has changed my perspective so that nothing seems permanent…. and not in a good healthy way… in a scary hard to live in fear way. Knowing that my husband had the same unimaginable thought too made me feel less alone and more normal, but then I thought of my son…. what will he feel about the permanence of the world? I just pray that he isn’t shaken to his little core like his mommy and daddy have been.