I almost never open this box, though I keep it close, as I know the contents and all they summarize will reduce me to a puddle. And every year before his birthday I wonder about posting – and mostly I do – but mostly not much – as his story is not fully my own, yet his story so completely a part of me.
The date on this newspaper matters is because it is the date Elijah was born, so tonight as I recall the long tense hours trying to hold off his birth, I opened the lid – and the puddle came as I knew it would.
There are many portions of memory too deep to be spoken. It’s as if the audible words will diminish their reality and import. I can’t bear for those things not to matter to someone else’s ears as they do in my heart so I keep them close.
There was so much crashing of unreal realities, surreal but tangible, axis tipping, brain numbing confusion and clarity – I recall those times as clearly as if I just opened a door to find the same setting had never moved.
Usually if I’ve opened this box, I hold the leftover flannelette from the teeny little jackets I made him… the blue checked jacket that I bought home to wash on his last full day, but couldn’t… wash it I mean… “What if”… “Just in case”… words I couldn’t think in full let alone say out loud – so I kept it in my pocket and held it on my face until the worst had happened when I gave it back to his mum who was so glad it still held his scent.
But instead of only leafing through the contents of the box, tonight I read the cards. And I went through some of the emails and journalings – and I found something I’d prayed before he was born.
Before I get to the prayer…
… some of the crashing in my mind was the two terrible realities of premature birth and all the congratulations – and the perpetual possible shadow of death over one so tiny… aligning those realities was impossible… they were jagged pieces, discordant music. Another of those brain-crashes is the existence of my stack of “congratulations on becoming grandparents” cards – mixed through with the “deepest sympathy for your loss” cards – bookend events to a three week life – and of course there are the emails, I’ve kept them all… hundreds of them… discordant in content with the one continuous thread of love.
Buckets and buckets and buckets of it.
There are the cards from Mum and Dad to each of the individual still-yet-children, aunties and uncles; the cards from families who’ve since known their own aching losses… and cards from people we’d never met… stories of longings and losses I’d have never known had our little grandsons’ story not been known to them…
But this prayer… the one I wrote and prayed weeks before he was born…
This prayer was born out of my at first, fear. Fear of judgement, and fear of peoples rejection. Then also of reality – the word was out – “they are so young”, “what are they going to do?”, words without Life and void of hope and void of momentum forwards – NOT void of love – but so very full of concern and an absence of the kind of instant joy that usually greets baby news. Not without truth due to their parents youthful standing, but I began to ache for this child to be received in joy…
So I prayed – “Dear God, please let this baby be received with uncommon love and uncommon grace. May this little one find welcome…”
And tonight I saw that not only was he received in uncommon love and uncommon grace, but God saw fit to show me my prayer, and that, in fact He had answered just so.
My miscarriage of 24 years ago showed me first-hand how very much every life matters. Lost before the first trimester was done, that life mattered. I grieved that loss deeply and it showed me a glimpse of what it might be to lose a born child.
The truest depth of my grief in our ‘days of Elijah’ – was to be helpless to salve the crashing violence of grief in his parents.
And so tonight I recall the short little life of our first grandbaby – not because I love to trawl through sorrow, and not because I’m not ‘moving on’ – but because his life and his death MATTERS. It mattered then, it matters now.
Is death something you ‘get over’? I dunno. But I do know that a life isn’t. And shouldn’t be. It should be remembered, smiled at, cried over – not to keep the wounds of loss raw, but to help heal them.
The effects of his stay are inverse to the length of it for all this combined changed us all at the deepest possible level – for the better. Happy ninth birthday tiny one.