It is so hard to wake up each day. I lay there and wonder “how will I feel today? Will I be able to handle this reality, or will today be a day the day that I will completely lose it?”. And then I have to get out of bed with that uncertainty. And it lasts through every minute of the day. On the way to church the other night I asked my husband when the terrible ache I had would go away. When he replied “probably never” I started sobbing telling him that I would die if it didn’t. I can live with sorrow, I can live with remembering, but those days where every other thought is of her and every thought brings this terrible gut wrenching knot into my chest…those days I feel like the pain will kill me. It’s a struggle to breathe. It’s a struggle to get through just minutes on those days.

Other days, I can remember more easily that she is not gone, just gone from us. I remember that she is more fully alive than any of us can know. On those days I am able to remind myself of one truth that I hold on to when I start to wonder why this happened. I hope I can explain that thought. It’s not that I wouldn’t do anything to change what has happened. I would. If I had been given a choice, I would gladly be gone from this earth and have her here with her brother and father. But I didn’t get that choice. I didn’t get any choice. What I try to remember is that even if I had some crystal ball and was told that after carrying her for eight and half months I would have to give birth to a baby that I would never get to see alive in all my days on this earth, I wouldn’t have stopped my pregnancy then. Les and I have never done any testing each time I have been pregnant because I know in my heart that for me, no choice that could come from them is one I could make. “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding. In all things acknowledge him and he will make your path straight”. I am so aware that my inability to control things is my biggest struggle in life, a struggle punctuated by becoming a mother. As for this trial, I don’t know how. I don’t know why. I don’t know what I will do. I do know that if the only thing I could give her in this earthly world was that many months of care in my body, if all I could give her was those few moments after her death to be held by her waiting family then so be it. I waited those months with the hope of giving her everything that I had inside of me, until the day I leave this earth, but it turned out that I was not given that opportunity. What I had the opportunity to give was so much less, but what I did get to give her I would have given willingly even if I had a choice. That I hold on to when I wonder why.