For ten years we've carried the immense weight of a missing child. It's strange how heavy a tiny, not-quite-one-pound baby is to carry when she's not here. She would be ten. Ten.
Two birthdays have passed for Elena since I've published anything here. I have written drafts in the interim years but ultimately decided to keep those raw emotions, struggles, and griefs in my heart.
The past several years have been filled with infertility and more loss. The three sweet faces of our living boys and the hope of eternity have kept me from despair, but it still aches so much to not have all of my children in my home. The empty car seats and chairs at the dining room table, the missing desks in the homeschool room, the little faces not in the pictures... they go unnoticed by most, but I see them everyday. I see the holes in our family and feel them in the empty spaces of my heart.
We were so hopeful last August when we thought we would finally get to meet a fifth baby this spring. Then our hearts broke again when baby Quinn was miscarried in September. Even though we lost Quinn so early, it was still devastating. Another baby missing from our lives. And this baby we didn't get to meet, didn't even get to baptize.
It's such a different loss than losing Elena, but it still aches to the core of my being. The abstraction of Quinn somehow makes it even harder in some ways, the baby I could almost touch but who slipped away so soon she was nearly just a dream. The picture I treasure says otherwise. Quinn was real, even though I never got to see him with my own eyes. (The family consensus seems to be that Quinn was a girl, though we have no way of knowing; I switch between both pronouns because I'm not as convinced as the others.)
Elena was born alive; she died in our arms. We bore witness to both her life and her death. There is nothing harder I have ever done. I cannot imagine a horror worse than watching my child die, struggling to breathe with tiny lungs not mature enough to sustain her, powerless to do anything at all to stop it. The order is so unnatural; the guilt of being unable to protect the little life entrusted to me is utterly devastating. Yet we were able to hold her, to love her, to baptize her. I have always clung tightly to the assurance of her baptism. We weren't able to give that to Quinn. With Quinn, there are only questions and no certainty.
For ten years we have been on this journey, and while the weight generally becomes easier to bear as we become accustomed to the burden of it, at times the crushing magnitude of it still feels overwhelmingly heavy.
Oh my sweet babies, how I love you and miss you and long to feel your weight in my arms. I pray we meet again where there are no farewells.
"For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them." -Psalm 139:13-16
when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them." -Psalm 139:13-16
In loving memory
Elena Marie
Quinn August
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