It's been so long since I wrote anything. Numerous reasons for that, most of which I intend to get down. At lot has changed and yet a lot has stayed the same.
We had a beautiful baby last year. Little Isabella Hope entered the world in May last year. This is the main reason for the silence. Having a baby after losing a child is a terrifying ride. I'm going to write about it, but that year took so much out of me just to try and get through it. I appreciate too - I was not the one growing her. I'll tell you all about it soon. Everything from the stress, the fear, the effects of all that. The Rona and all the way to a culmination of me sobbing relentlessly like a child at the birth. Regardless, she is healthy and beautiful and incredible and funny and I could go on for ever and ever and I am so damn in love with her.
All of our babies have pretty much been identical. Even Google's photo recognition software couldn't distinguish between Nora and Bella. But, it's been an absolute joy to do it all over again.
There are a ton of parallels between our lives back in 2016 and 2017 and now. Two girls, their ages are similar to Nora and Hannah, give or take a few months. School, all the activities Nora loves and the similarities to how wonderful a big sister she is, and those questionable quality big sister moments all at the same time. We have her 7th birthday coming up this year and if you've read any of this blog you'll know that's the moment things turned sour. So there is some anxiety for the future and navigating these coming milestones.
Obviously her 7th birthday will be a big moment, but then before she hits 8, she will reach the point where she will be older than Hannah when she died. Ever an endless emotional event to traverse.
Still, we are happy, healthy, thankful and certainly blessed with how things are turning out these days. We've met lots of new Friends through Nora and the neighborhood we moved to a few years ago is great.
I was thinking recently about the past year and it got me thinking about grief. It seems like everyone I know has suffered a loss in the last few years and I try and make sense of my emotions.
I've written about Christmas's past but this year wasn't a terrifying event. We weren't daunted by the event. Even putting up the tree with the family baubles was a pleasant experience. Smiling at the 11 year old 'Babies first Christmas' ones, and even the angel Hannah ones. Christmas trees, or at least ours is, are like a family story.
Covid led to us being isolated from our family and it was pretty much two years before we saw any of them. The pregnancy and Birth was all alone and contact was all virtual. Finally the world started seeing sense though and we had both sets of parents over for a spell at the end of the year, and Kate's folks stayed for Christmas. Yup, you read that right, both sets of our Parents at the same time in the same house.
It was honestly just nice and calm. We did all the Christmas things, we took the kids to see Santa, we watched all the movies, we baked and we wrapped a ton of presents. It wasn't like we ignored any of it. Just a nice little Christmas to put in the history books.
We didn't ignore Hannah either. She'll always be a center piece of our lives regardless of whether she is here or not and that was the case this year.
Once Christmas passed I felt a bit of a change in me. Hard to explain, but I feel different. I know we all talk about New Years resolutions but this is different. It's like Christmas was a metric of sorts to quantify where we are in our grief. Or how driven by grief we still are. I don't know, its hard to explain.
If I really try and think about it I kind of feel there is an acceptance now somewhere deep inside that she has really gone. At least from here - we'll meet again. Or better put, an acceptance she is never coming home, as a slightly better way of explaining it. I don't know whether that really has been the case in the past, and so Christmas felt a bit like that validation process we can navigate most things comfortably and with love and hope in our hearts. Still grieving, still longing, still willing to swap the world for five more minutes, but also now carrying that grief in a more loving and careful way.
How can I describe it? I guess it's like carrying a big heavy ball of weight that no longer quite consumes events by growing bigger and bigger until it's so big and so scary its incredibly difficult to hold. Now I feel like that ball is an accepted part of us. We nurture it, sooth it in some cases, and welcome it's presence. It's never going away.
So the turn of the year has felt different. I feel different. I feel better. I feel like I'm ready to live again and want to live, and be the Dad I want to be. If I'm completely honest, I'm not sure I was in that mindset the last few years.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying I'm fixed. It's always there. The pain will never go away. I still grieve. I still long for her. I still get those sucker punches in the gut. Those little moments that take you by surprise and throw a punch into your soul. I had one last week on the school run as she ran in front of me and I swear it was like going back in time.
A big deep sucker punching painful kind of deja vous. It didn't wreck me though. I felt it, it shook me a little, but then soothed the ball of grief and smiled as I got to watch her bounce her way to school.
I'm sure some psychologist could all make sense of it all and map it all out with fancy terms. For me though, to quote a line from a song, 'It gets easier but it never gets easy'.
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