Tag: grief

23 and Me

I read an article some years ago about the physical connection between mothers and their babies. Beyond the obvious, it presented the details of a scientific study that proved a lasting bond at the cellular level. It’s called fetal microchimerism, which is a science-y way of saying you gave part of yourself to me before you were born. Cells that even now, decades later, help make up my skin, my blood, and the marrow in my bones.

Those little cells mean more to me today than any other time of year. Maybe because this is the day when I remember the entirety of your life happened inside me. You were alive, heartbeat strong, until my body couldn’t hold you anymore. Then you were gone.

Except for those persistent little cells.

When I think about this, I realize how much has changed in the last twenty-three years. How much I’ve changed. Back then I pushed to keep you present, your name spoken aloud regularly. Worried if people forgot, you might somehow disappear from having ever existed. Like I would be forced to let you go in a deeper way than I already had.

These days, I feel a strange comfort in the quiet knowledge that part of me isn’t me at all, it’s you. I carry those little cells with me like a wonderful secret, one that I choose to share from time to time. But mostly I just hold it close, thankful it’s mine. That you’re mine.

That’s enough for me today, on your twenty-third birthday. Your little cells, and your brother’s weekly visits are just about the only things that make sense to me. I don’t have to look far to find chaos and confusion in this world, but the part of you still alive in me helps quiet the noise.

Happy Birthday Elena, my shining light. You are, and always will be, my favorite girl.

Defying Gravity

Trendelenburg. I knew it started with a “T.” It has taken me seventeen years to look it up. I wanted to know the word, the actual medical terminology, for the positioning of my body when they were trying to save you. The practical definition describes laying flat on one’s back at an incline of 15-30 degrees with the feet elevated above the head. My heart didn’t care about practical definitions that day. I knew it was all about defying gravity.

How do you battle against a force so strong, it literally holds the galaxy together and causes the ocean tides? How do you come up against the very thing that keeps the planets in orbit around the sun? For the sake of a life. One life. Your life.

The past seventeen years has held a lot of life for me, Elena. I know you know, you’ve been with me for all of it. The exciting, the frightening, the heartbreaking, and the indescribably beautiful. You’re at the heart of everything I do. And in those years I’ve had to learn a lot about letting go and letting God lead. I had to allow my heart to break a little bit more for it to be woven back together, reshaped in His hands.

Every year on your birthday I look at myself from the inside out and observe who I am, retracing the steps that brought me here. I think about who you are, and who you would be if you were here where I can see you with my eyes, not just my heart. I thank God for my family and for the growth in each of us. I look at the ways I’ve learned how to defy the gravity of my soul.

We couldn’t save you, not in the way that we wanted to. But He has saved me, time and time again, in the way that He knows I needed to be. His love defies all of the forces on earth that have kept me bound. Each day I’m given the opportunity to defy gravity by stepping out of the shadow of fear and into the light of His love. I’m seeing life from a new perspective now. My life and yours.

Happy Birthday, my beautiful girl. You’re my shining light, now and always.