‘Lilies cry’ a poem by Tanya Loewen-Watson
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Category Archives: Beareavement help
What should be…
It should be your 8th birthday today.
We should have cake and balloons.
You should be smiling as you open gifts.
We should be celebrating.
But.
It will be the 8th anniversary of the traumatic start to your short life.
It will be the 8th night I relive giving birth to a blue baby.
It will be the 8th day I remember the silence as they resucitated you.
It will be the 1rst day of your 51 days of life for the 8th time.
2 months
2 months or 58-61 days (make up most 2 months stretches) or 1430 hours in 2 months of the 8544 hours in a year, its about 6% of the time in a year, seems so little to be so heavy. I carry it each year. I carry it with the grief of other losses but hers has affected me the most.
Just let it go… I’m sure they wonder and I have, the whole first year I carried a heavy grief and it was the hardest, the following years it was around 6 months of each year, around year 5 it was heavy for 3 months. I’m ok with accepting how her memory these 2 months are like a weighted bag tied around my shoulders, the weight will lift as I’ve learned it does by the spring. Not to say I dont think of her as often it just doesn’t hurt as much the rest of the year.
I dont ever want a day or time when I don’t feel the weight of my grief for her.
You get used to carrying it.
I think of her at the very least every 2 minutes each day of the year since her death in 2012.
I always wonder if I had just 2 more minutes what would I do. Hold her of course. Smell her hair, touch her cheeks.
These 2 months (Dec.18 – Feb.18) belong to you, not that I obsess but I find I cant escape. The pain is stronger as are the memories and reminders.
I dont like to wrap presents anymore, what a waste of paper. I used to love Christmas music, I collected all my favorites and played them on rotation for weeks, now I change the station. Walk around and look at lights? I cant remember why that was fun. I do still love looking at my tree with all the special ornaments and the memories they hold. I love my 3 kids excitement at the school break and wonder of gifts or will it snow. I smile for them though I spend most days fighting back tears.
Her birthday is in 2 weeks, she lived almost 2 months
She’s going to die all over again in my heart and mind in 2 months time.
I think of you, sometimes in awe, sometimes in pain. But your always just a thought away.
A date, a memory, a month. A commercial, a song, a regret. Your forever at the back of my mind but front of my heart.
Lily Emma Olive Hall
December 30 2011 – February 18 2012
Thanks for reading
Sheri
7 Years of Grief
‘Angel Number 7 … Number seven is one of those figures. It symbolizes every positive and valuable matter in existence like prosper life, happiness, renewal, and perfection. Some numerologist even believes that number seven is so perfect and powerful that it represents a connection to the universe.’
7 days in a week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday.
If you were born on a Thursday Oct 2nd it will return every 7 years for that exact date to come back around, every 7 years Halloween is a Friday, or New years a Saturday or Christmas a Sunday, what I am getting at is 7 years seems like a cycle, a full circle back to the beginning.
Your 0 when you are born, 7 on the exact same day 7 years later. Age 7, grade 2; been in the school system for around 3 years already not a little kid anymore but still a child. Perhaps you have experienced loss of a pet, divorce or death of a family member but you are still innocent enough to believe in the good of the world you still laugh more than older kids and adults, finding the silliness in things everywhere.
The next cycle brings you to 14; only 7 short years later and you jump from a carefree kid to an anxious, nervous, pubescent teenager! There was warnings and hopefully parental help and guidance from good role models. 14 is scary a scary time, your no longer a ‘child’ but still not an adult…
Another 7, 21! Oh the places you can go and the things your allowed to see, not all equally good things.
I will stop here with hopes that we all, at least those that can read know their 7 time tables…
I have very accurate memories of being 7, 14, 21, 28, 35 but not so much other years, I find that interesting. Maybe I have tried harder to remember and retain them or maybe it is a coincidence or maybe its a part of the greater purpose in life… ‘A greater connection to the universe’
Every 7 years is a major milestone in life if and when you reach them you look back, you reflect on the knowledge you have acquired through your growth which in turn helps you to keep growing, keep learning; moving forward. It is said that when someone experiences trauma of any kind they may become ‘stuck’ at a certain age, mindset or maturity level, this makes sense to me with people I know and have observed.
When I was 7, I was attending a french school in a neighbourhood we had just moved, I was shy and didn’t fit in with the affluent kids that occupied this school, I watched my brother get bullied and often played alone in the forest beside the school, something that would be forbidden and for good reason in today’s world. That same brother grew up to become a drug addict that has lived on and off the streets his whole life.
At 14 my parents were in the middle of starting the divorce process, we had just moved again, I had just started high school. I won’t go into the unnecessary behaviour that came about at 14 but looking back I wish I had a role model, an adult who cared enough to help me navigate through being a teen. I was smart but wanted friends more and being pretty it is easy to fall into the wrong crowd they showed attention, I sought it.
21, 14-21 were the hardest in terms of growth and growth setbacks but by 21 I returned to school to graduate, I bought a condo, I regularly went to the gym. I also met my now husband and father to my 4 children at 21. But the 7 years between 14 and 21 a friend had been murdered, 2 others overdosed and 1 died of a freak accident. I watched my dad fall deeply into his alcoholism after my parents divorce which was followed by the death of his dad. Eventually losing our house, we were all on our own well before 18. I was in a car accident that had me in the hospital for weeks and unable to walk for months… But by 21 I had come out the other side, I had been working full time since 16, having to drop out of school in grade 11 to pay rent, I did many things I was finally proud of by 21, I felt like I was maturing, growing, taking care of myself.
By 28, I had gotten married had my first child was about to give birth to my 2nd boy, I had lived in 4 different cities, worked 3 different places.
35! That’s a big one I think, when you reach 35 you are officially, no excuses, 100% an adult. Now, I have lost all 4 of my grandparents, a dozen friends to car accidents, suicide, drugs overdoses. I have also watched many of my friends divorce or watch their parents die of cancer. But the biggest thing that happened to me was the birth and death and my 3rd child, followed by the birth of my miraculous rainbow, my 4th child and living through the process of deep, raw grief with my husband. How we survived the roller coaster of child loss is beyond me. But we did.
I am now 39 and in 2 years will be 42 and another cycle will have passed. But the reason 7 years was stuck in my thoughts is because it will be 7 years since the incredibly traumatic birth of my daughter who lived only 52 days.
This Monday December 30th 2019 it will be 7 years since Monday December 30th 2011 that the thing that has scarred me, changed me, hurt me and forced me to grieve undeniably lines up. The year ahead, 2020 all the days will line up with that time 7 years ago…. Me attending a PAC meeting on a Tuesday in February only to be called home to give her medicine and eventually CPR with her returning to the hospital, 3 days later its Friday, its valentines day, I buy her a purple elephant with the hopes of giving it to her when she comes home again. 7 days later on Tuesday February 18 2012 she dies. This Tuesday February 18 2020 will be the 7th anniversary of that death. The feels flood back as do the tears, the headache the pain, but it is less painful 7 years later. the grief is not raw, it is not every minute in agony, but it exists inside me and when I need to know, to feel the pain I just sit in my mind with memories.
We look for patterns in grief because we are constantly trying to understand it.
What I am wondering, is: Does it take a full cycle, a full 7 years to go through the grieving process? I would say I feel most like me again though I will never be the same, I am definitely not the ghost I turned into the immediate following years. I learned through my grief , I grown with it and I think finally accepted it. 7 years of Grief later.
Thanks for reading,
Namaste
Sheri
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Some interesting reads on Seven 7 in links below:
https://www.betemunah.org/seven.html
Grief is a Daily Challenge
I searched and searched the internet, library and book stores after my daughter and then both grandmother’s died all 3 within 4 months.
I needed to understand death, understand why.
How do we live so unabashedly blind pretending we and others wont die?
In the book:
Mindfully: A Compassionate and Spiritual Guide to Coping with Loss
By Sumeet Kumar
I found the quote above and for whatever reason it resonates with me.
So I’m sharing it with you.
After I made it into a pretty meme if course.
Thanks for reading,
Sheri
#Truth
I had a FB memories pop up from 2012 this is what I wrote…
So I made it into a meme with my artwork.
Thanks for reading.
Some days….
Grief poems, thoughts & rituals.
Made my first meme with a poem I wrote 6 years ago for my daughter…
That is what I love about writing, keeping journals, diary posts etc… You can go back to exactly how you felt at a certain moment in time be it happy or sad.
Sheri
So it starts and the next 6 months are heavy…
The following months that lead up to my girls supposed to be 7th birthday, which is followed by the 7th date since her death (2 months later) so needless to say my not so good months of the year are soon to come; this time of year for me is heavy.
September:
As the beginning of another season. The changing colors, fallen leaves of autumn, the beginning of another school year. Another year of growth for my other children, a new grade, a new teacher, whole new experiences. And one looming thought… the little girl who would be entering Grade 2, what would she choose to be for Halloween as an almost 7 year old? would she start to love math and hate art? How tall would she be now? …
October:
My birth month, never a big celebration as I do not like being the focus or for money wasted. But the thoughts are always there, as I age. Am I wiser? Do I care more or less? I guess its all changed dramatically over time, through grief, because of life and its unrelenting series of events, be them good or bad. The future or death really is always at the back of my mind. And of course another Thanksgiving holiday without her…
November:
I do not know if you’ve ever been to a schools Remembrance day ceremony? (Nov.11) Usually some of the kids sing sad songs while a slide show of graves and war pictures fill the room. Poems are read by innocent voices, too young to really understand the words that seem to make the adults in the rooms tear up. Outside becomes quite cold, the trees are bare and I always think of how in November of 2011 I was 8 months pregnant about to have a baby…
December:
Was my favorite month, before… I used to decorate December 1st for the holiday season, a fun day of unpacking years of decorations, an activity I would get excited for every beginning of Fall. Something I once loved so much. Is now something I dread. Another Christmas she wont be here, her stocking, another birthday (Dec 30th) we wont celebrate, followed immediately by a new year. December is the worst…
January:
How I made those 3 hour round trips to the hospital everyday, how I begged (felt like anyway) friends to watch my other kids so I didn’t have to drag them there every day. The cold, dark days, the fact another year has gone by just like that…
February:
Is the shortest month of the year but the longest in my memory. I went out, for the first time in 11 months, to a parent advisory meeting, it was Tuesday February 11 2012, I went because an acclaimed parent speaker was giving a talk that night. Another mom commented, how she couldn’t believe I was there, you know having a newborn and all. She didn’t know I was trying for normalcy after what I had been going through since the traumatic birth of my daughter. The speaker had just started and 20 min in I got a call from my husband. He forgot to give our daughter her phenobarb (phenobarbitol is a seizure medication) hers was given through her G-tube and as I had always given the dose, he didn’t actually know how to. I later found out he called because our then almost 4 year old had fallen near where she was laying and it startled her so much that she went blank, he was scared and called me with the excuse she needed her medicine, which was partly true. So I left. I got home at 830, kissed my little 3 & 5 year old boys goodnight and heard Steve scream for me. Sheri come here! I ran down the stairs, I could hear the terror in his voice. Shes not breathing! I grabbed her from him, I yelled to call 911, to tell them an infant is unconscious and not breathing, that is what I learnt you say when you need them to come to you first. But in this case was also true. He put the speaker on, I explained I was giving her CPR but it wasn’t working, she asked me if I tilted her neck (step 2!) no, as soon as I did, she gasped for air. Seconds later the ambulance was at our door and once again I was abandoning my other babies in the middle of the night. Once again I was terrified and watching my littlest baby be hooked up to multiple cords, poked for IVs. But all I kept thinking was how my boys would be scared and sad when they woke up and their mom and sister were gone. I was up all night, they got her stable and all seemed on the up and up the next day, until she had 3 more seizures and I ran down the hallway as the room filled with too many doctors and nurses, codes being yelled over the PA. She was transferred back to Children’s Hospital where, x-rays and CT scans found other problem we never knew about, she needed a tracheotomy to breathe (a hole in her throat) if we wanted her to live. That was on top of the 3 heart surgeries we were already waiting for her to have, before this happened. She would never survive them, she wasn’t healthy enough, chances were slim for a healthy baby, which she wasn’t. I remember sitting in my room staring out the window as the doctor explained all the surgeries. That we needed to meet very soon to make a decision.
The world went still for me.
They tried to move us to the children’s hospice but I was too scared that she would die during transfer. Another regret I carry.
Tuesday February 18 2012 we signed a DNC (do not resuscitate) they took our her breathing tube, and IV and I held her as she took or struggled more like through her last breath.
Her funeral was a week later and shortly after that it began… the you must be ok by now comments that infuriated me, the you can have another comments, the she’s not suffering anymore, those expecting me to smile only months after her death. little did they know my grief journey hadn’t even started, as I was in denial after the shock wore off. Now I relive those early days, the middle struggle and the final blow every year and it starts in September and goes until February 28 when I get a slight reprieve from the heavy feeling that seems to live in my heart 6 months a year.
Thanks for reading,
Sheri
Its not about me…
‘His sister died when he was 6’ I recently had to explain to the principal of my older son at school in regards to an issue about behavior and something that had occurred between him and another boy. The call went silent, no I didn’t know that…
‘Its his sister, who died 2 years ago’ I explained to my other sons kindergarten teacher after he asked about a drawing my younger son had drawn that included his sister and that he couldn’t explain to the teacher, who thought he was seeing ghosts or had an imaginary friend, it came from a concerned place I believe…
‘He lost his little sister in kindergarten’ which can explain why he is a quieter kid I said to the vice principal when asked about any issues they should know about as he was starting a new school for grade 3…
Not to forget the mass emails I had to send out to coaches and current teachers(at the time), their friends parents about my boys losing their sister back in 2012, when they were only 4 and 6. How I had to explain typing through my own hand soaked tears about what happened and to please be easy with my children in these difficult times and upcoming days and weeks…
How every time I had to mention it, include it or divulge this piece of my broken heart, I always did so with their best interest in mind, in hopes that gentler gloves could deal with them if issues arose, hadn’t they been through enough? ‘Losing’ their parents right after Christmas when they went to the hospital to have their little sister not to return for days then for the next 51 days being driven around by neighbors and friends parents as their own parents were suddenly gone at the hospital all the time. Our house became quiet those dark weeks that turned into months, our children had gone from happy innocent children, to those that not only lost their baby sister but the parents they knew forever, because we were never the same again. I wanted people to understand my kids didn’t need to suffer anymore. It wasn’t about me.
So I shared and it made people uncomfortable. Uncomfortable to be around me but its not about me…
Every time I had to fill out a form asking for any necessary reasons for concerns the pen hovered, do I mention their loss? do I say they may say her name, do I recall painful details? Does it matter to them? or this situation? I did get to a point years later where I stopped filling it out, thinking time enough had passed I didn’t need to, until a couple weeks ago I go a call that my son was in trouble at school. We talked briefly, my son had apparently jokingly said he was going to kill someone, in his defense his young, undeveloped brain of 13 did not understand that saying this is equal to saying you have a bomb on a plane in today’s world, especially with school shootings and such, but lesson learned he will never speak like that again, joking or not…
This boy in particular had recently lost a family member and was feeling a bit touchy, and was acting out at school, when prompted he said what my son had said to him which set off a firestorm of ‘rules’ that needed to be followed. Long story shortened the 4th call with the principal, I felt the need to tell him about how my son had lost his sister when he was 6, he had gotten into trouble in kindergarten because of his grief and anger at school and people did not tell me about it, it was shielded from me so to speak. when I found out I was so upset, upset I could have been there for my little boy, upset at having that teachable moment taken from me, that even in our own pain we do not physically fight with others, that if he felt a certain way all he had to do was call me or ask the teacher to call me and I would have been there. I didn’t say this to the principal but what I explained was that my sons never been in trouble, not since this incident in kindergarten and now 6 years later, he is in grade 7 and was crying as the school (police) liaison officer spoke to him about his “threat” I was not there. I see I have made the principal uncomfortable, because since this incident when I see him in the hallways it is different, as it was back then after someone found out…
The time I had to explain my middle sons drawings to his kindergarten teacher, the same thing happened, he looked at me with pity, as soon as I mentioned he lost his sister he said but stopped himself mid way ‘so you lost a’… I kept talking about my son, it was not about me…
Or the time my oldest was in grade one, so the same year she died, his teacher at the 1st parent teacher interview, says to me so I know about lily, I said oh? she says H(my son) talks about her a lot, I explain we/he goes to group therapy at Canucks Children Hospice and is encouraged to talk about her, she says its OK but that he seems tired a lot. Yeah, me too I thought. Grief is tiring, but it wasn’t about me…
Or the time when my oldest was in grade 4 and wrote this on his jump rope for heart heart…
Or 2 weeks ago when I dropped off my middle sons violin, who was 4, in preschool when his sister died and is in grade 5 now, I found this on his desk…
** Every year elementary schools in Canada participate in the Jump rope for heart campaign.
So as I have said, felt, voiced since 2012, yes my heart broke when I lost my daughter, my third child but my heart broke even more witnessing what my sons went through, still learn to grow through. So no, its not about me…
Thanks for reading.
Sheri
Dimes
I keep a corner outside my daughter’s room, it was my first daughter’s and is now my seconds.
Beside it to the right is, was her bedroom and to the left is the laundry room.
I have been having a harder time lately.
I stop and light her candle as I do often, kiss my fingers to her photo and proceed to finish the laundry.
Where I immediately find this.
A dime.
Now it is not the first but this one came at a time I truly needed.
I have found one on the floor in my closet, on the ground outside my car door, on a walk.
Why dimes? Why not quarters or nickels and some will say, like in the post I share below that finding coins period is a sign from above and others believe it is specifically dimes that we receive from ones we lost.
What do you think? Has it happened to you?
Thanks for reading.
Sheri
https://www.ask-angels.com/spiritual-guidance/finding-dimes-pennies-from-heaven/
https://www.auntyflo.com/Superstition-dictionary/finding-dimes
https://passingthru.com/finding-dimes/
