Four Years Later

My sweet girl has been on my mind a lot recently as her birthday draws near. I feel so guilty and conflicted. My life is so drastically different than it was four years ago that it doesn't even seem like it could have ever been my life at all...

Brian and I are no longer married. Losing Maggie created a very deep pit that we were never really able to climb out of.  It changed him so much more than I realized. We healed separately and not together. Or at least I thought we did. I didn't know. We never talked about it. He assumed. I assumed. In fact, it has only been in the last month that I have had any insight as to how it got to him.

My best friend (and sister) Fran died 18 months after Maggie. Fran was so involved in my pregnancy, the birth and death and healing. The silence after my sister's death was deafening. Suddenly I felt so alone. I  felt had no one to connect with. No one really understood.

Fast forward to now and where do I stand? I'm divorced and have not had any more children.

So where is the guilt and confliction that I mentioned? It lies in my happiness. I feel guilty for moving on. I feel guilty for being "glad" that I don't have kids. For being glad that I'm not that woman at the playground. For being glad that I can come and go as I please and don't have to worry about arranging a babysitter.

Please don't misunderstand me. If my daughter was here, I would be over the moon with happiness. I would have gladly given up everything that was "me" for the endless appointments with doctors and long hospital stays for her countless surgeries. But you know what? She's not here. And living the rest of my life in a pit of dispair and forever drowning in grief wouldn't have benefited anyone.

It has taken four years but I am finally feeling like I am pulling it all back together and becoming ME again -- I'm living in the city that I have wanted to live in for basically my entire life. I have an amazing boyfriend who is so insanely good to me that my face flushes and I'm a puddle of giddy goop every time I think about him.

It has taken four years but it has finally happened. I am happy.

Maggie caused me to change in ways that I could never explain to anyone. I am a kinder and more compassionate person because of her. I appreciate more. I take for granted less. I am a better person because of my daughter.

-Kelli

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Several of you have mentioned trying to track me down and I'm sorry for not being more accepting. For a very long time I wasn't in a place where I could be who I needed to be. I pushed so hard to heal that I alienated myself from a fantastic group of people who wanted to be there to support me.

Four years later and here I am! I welcome you all to contact me through whatever social mediums you would like!

Facebook (I ignored my FB for a long time and have been trying to get better about being more active recently.)
Twitter (I'm not super active, but it's a random view into my world. You've been warned.)
Pinterest (because everyone has one.)

Hitting a brick wall at 70 mph.

I want so badly to write, but I don't know what to say.

I'm currently reading Waiting with Gabriel. It's a story written by the mother of a baby boy who was diagnosed with Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome, and his parents being forced to chose between endless surgeries or "comfort care" that would result in his passing a few days after being born. I've only read 29 pages so far yet they seem like a memory of mine, pulled out and written on paper.

Magdalyn's diagnosis was even more severe than Gabriel's. Hypoplastic right heart with pulmonary stenosis and dextrocardia. They never did an autopsy, so we can't say for sure if anything else might have been wrong or how severe the heart block was.

I can't imagine the pain the might have endured if she had lived longer. If given the choice, which would I have chosen? As it is, her very very brief time on this earth was spent in surgery. We were told she would die almost immediately if she did not have the pacemaker put in. She would not survive. This was her only chance. She died an hour after surgery.

It's strange the things I remember; these tiny memories so strong that they bring me to tears and leave me teetering on the edge of losing it.

We were in our room waiting to be told that we could go see her. The doctor came in and told us that we needed to go now, or we might be too late. We were waiting to get clearance to move me, since I had just been more or less severed in two, and I was not supposed to be in a sitting position for another six hours. My nurse walked in and said she wasn't waiting anymore. I don't remember getting from the bed to the chair. I just remember that my nurse was pushing the wheelchair so fast that I felt like she was almost running. I was not upset. I was excited. I was about to see my baby girl for the first time. When she was born they rushed her off so quickly that I never got to see her.

I never saw my baby alive.

When we entered the NICU I saw the team of doctors, there were nine or ten of them around her. Just standing. Then I heard it. The sound of a flat line on a heart monitor. You hear this sound all the time on TV and in movies. It is now in my head as the worst sound in the entire world. The worst sound of my life. The sound of the end of her life. I wasn't told by a doctor while I was in a waiting room. I wasn't standing around, pacing back and forth. I was trapped in a wheelchair and the sound of that flat line was like being in a car and hitting a brick wall at 70 mph.

Surely there were other babies in the NICU, but I don't remember seeing any baby in that room but my daughter. There must have been nurses and parents, but I don't remember them.

My baby is in heaven. She is with God. She is not in pain. I try to take comfort in this. But some times, some days, I just want my baby to be here with me. And today, today is one of those days.