never forget

The months that surrounded Abel's birth shattered me.  Not in tiny little hairlines fractures . . . Shattered. Like a wrecking ball. Like a mallet to a mirror; with a force and finality that I had never known. 

The three of us clung together.  Are ability to trust, our faith, our innocence, our dreams- all burnt to the ground.  Our son's high pitched painful screams rang in our heads even when he slept. I sobbed as week after week only brought more bad news.  Those hits are still coming today.  Even though the woman I once was is gone, I am not.  My son is not. Life is not.

That is my experience, so  I cannot pretend to know what a woman that loses a child during childbirth goes through.  My pain and my loss are a different kind.  I have heard others accuse loss moms of just being bitter.  To harsh. To loud.  They tell them that some babies just die and they should accept that. That my son was meant to die, or meant to be disabled.

"Embrace peace.Move on.Have another baby." 

We are so removed from true pain and lose in our culture.  The mistakes made at my son's birth devastated his life as well as ours. This senseless, catastrophic event can not be ignored. It is an endless abyss between the what once was and what remains now. Life is sending up a warning flare for all to see.  Life demands that I STAND & SPEAK.  Not because I have not forgiven but because I have not forgotten.

"The Stupid   neither   forgive   or   forget;
the   naive   forgive   &   forget;
the   wise   forgive . . .  but   do   not   forget."

-Thomas  s.  szasz