Grieving again and again

It has been 6 months since I last saw Hallelujah’s face.

We pulled up to the empty parking lot at McHenry’s Funeral Home, underneath a tree that was thinking about sprouting some color. I found it strange that the girls were so looking forward to seeing her again, because I was dreading it a little. What if she looked…dead? Of course she would look dead. She only really looked alive for a couple of hours of her life, right after she was born, before the seizures and the morphine and the Ativan closed her dark eyes and loosened her clenched fists. We were used to her looking not quite alive, but now we would be looking on her days after dying and I worried that it would be a rough last impression. There was no easy way to do this, so we walked through those doors and into the first room off the lobby.

The room felt very empty, with the little Moses basket sitting on a small table in the middle, all alone in the near dark. One lamp stood in the corner, dimmed down to somber the mood, I suppose.

I turned up the light.

There in the Moses basket lay the body of my baby, wrapped in her yellow blanket, just the way I’d put her in there, five days before. She didn't look much different, just much more peaceful, if that was possible. When she arrived here, she had been wearing her white micropreemie hat, but I had asked the director to put her pink bow on her for this last goodbye with us. That’s the memory of her we will carry with us. We brought the bow on Friday, the same day we picked out our daughter’s 19-inch plastic white casket and asked for them to cut lockets of her hair for us to keep. They don’t make smaller caskets.

In that dark room, we took some time, comforting our kids, not knowing what to say.

Judah and Piper said quick goodbyes and wanted to leave, but Cayden – Cayden couldn’t be hurried. I think in those precious moments, she was memorizing her sister’s face, the way her bow was actually too big for her head, the way her short eyelashes stood out against her pale skin, the way one nostril was bigger than the other. Cayden carefully felt her sister’s soft hair between her fingertips one last time, clutching the Hallelujah stuffy close to her chest.

Once again, we had to pull Cayden away. We all had to walk away from that room, a bunch of crying messes, taking one day at a time. 

As we walked out the door, I took a big breath of the brisk March first air – we got through this hard thing. We could get through more.

Yesterday, I talked for 45 minutes with a grief counselor about my children and their grief. This meeting prompted a talk with the girls about getting grief counseling, because I realized that maybe there are some effects still lingering that need to be addressed, including outbursts of anger and trouble falling asleep at night. While I like to think that we have “grieved well” throughout the past 10 months since Hallelujah’s diagnosis, I’m recognizing that it is a lifelong process.

We will never be whole.

We will never be “over it.”

But we will continue to sing Hallelujah.

Because that’s the one thing we’ve MADE ourselves do.

Even when it didn’t feel good, even when if hurt to sing it, we forced ourselves to praise God through it.

Singing her name now is a gift that sneaks up on me at the most random times. Just today, when I jumped in my car to take Macie to her vet appointment, the first word on the radio was, “Hallelujah!”

My baby girl still makes me smile.

In these moments, I know that God sees me – and he is smiling too.