Before I had my girls, I remember hearing mothers say that having children is like a piece of your heart walking around in the world. I always thought that was a little weird and didn’t fully understand it until Megan and Madison entered my life. There was this invisible string connecting me to them and that string got longer and longer as they got older. The further away they were from me, the more aware I became of the pain and worry involved with being a parent. My job was to protect them, watch over them, and make sure they stayed healthy. My entire existence revolved around the welfare of these two little girls from the moment I woke up to the moment they went to sleep.
Over time, life promises that you’ll be touched by loss in some way. Friends and extended family lose loved ones and the platitudes begin. No one knows what to say in those situations but they try. They weren’t directly connected to the person so they imagine what it must be like. The sentiments and heartfelt messages are all they can give. A part of being a parent involves having those nightmares about loss the moment your child is born. The thought of losing them is too much to think about so the imagination takes over in the worst way at times. You think that those nightmares must be exactly what it would feel like to lose your child. But those platitudes enter your mind from all the people who have tried to be helpful to others and you try to comfort yourself over the idea of the unimaginable likelihood of it happening to you. “Your heart will heal.”
Now that I’m intimately aware of what this loss feels like, I can honestly say that my heart will never heal. I think about those early days when my heart was walking around in the world getting further and further away from me and I realized that she took that piece of my heart with her every time she wasn’t right next to me. Every day she was at school, in the other room, upstairs, with her dad somewhere without me, that piece of my heart was with her. Now that she’s gone, that piece of my heart is gone also. It’ll always be a hole that can’t be filled while I’m still on this earth.
I know my heart will heal eventually because the moment I enter heaven and see her face again, my heart will be whole again. Until then, I have to find a way to live with that emptiness while also continuing to parent Megan and be a wife to Brian. I’m not a part of this equation. I can’t take care of myself yet because I haven’t forgiven myself yet. But I still have enough in me to take care of them.