Two Years

Well, it's been quite awhile since I have written on this site. I guess I can only write so many times how deep the grief is and how hard it is to lose a child. Perhaps the rawness of grief has ebbed some; however, the sorrow is always with me. I sometimes find myself pretending that Jacob is still away at college. Then, reality hits and I realize this is what life will always be like.

Tomorrow, June 14th will be two years since Jacob died. Life will never be as it was. I will never have my three children together again. There will never be our whole family sittting around the dinner table. We'll never be together for holidays. I will always have one less birthday card or Mother's Day card. I could go on, but enough of that...

I can now talk about Jacob's death without always crying. His death, like his life and the lives of all my children, is now part of the fabric of my life.

I will be glad when tomorrow is over - not because the day itself is any harder than any other day, but because this day forces me to think back to that awful weekend two years ago. I don't let myself go there very often and when I do, it is hard to recover from the intense and extended crying that happens. I still wonder why I didn't insist Jacob go to the hospital on June 9th when he was having some problems with fluid retention. He so wanted to go on that yearbook retreat and he was more worried about driving through Atlanta during rush hour traffic than he was about his swollen ankles. I wish I hadn't listened to our transplant nurse when she said that he had always had problems with fluid retention, so just give him an extra dose of Lasix. I didn't want him to be disappointed and not be able to go, so I listened to her and let him go.

I will never forget his face when he got out of his car that fateful afternoon on June 12th and saw me and said, "Mama, I don't feel so good." He started crying because he knew something was seriously wrong. The rest of the weekend was such a nightmare. We knew he was in serious rejection, but we just didn't think we would lose him so fast. That last day was so hard. I can still see him looking at me and telling me he was sorry and that he loved me. I so wish that his death had been a peaceful one where he had died in his sleep. The look on his face when he went into cardiac arrest still haunts me to this day.

I still have not reconciled myself to where God is in all of this. I do not understand how this fits in some master plan. While I do believe that there is a God, I do not believe that prayer works the way most of think it does. I recently read a blog by a Dr. Gordon Livingston - a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins. He lost two sons, one to Leukemia (my father died of this years ago), and another son to suicide. He expresses many of the same emotions I do and he raises the same questions about prayer - if we pray and ask God for healing and good things happen, we thank God and say our loved one or ourselves were healed because of our prayers. We don't seem to have an answer to those who pray just as hard and have just as many people praying and yet, their prayers are not answered.

One last thought on this - let's say you're going to go on an airplane trip. You miss your flight and the flight you were supposed to take crashes and all are killed. If you say, "Thank you, God, for keeping me from taking that flight" or "God protected me" etc., how do you respond to the families of those who died on that flight? Surely, there were people on that flight who loved God also? I could go on and on about this, but I'll stop with that.

Dr. Livingston has written several books, but one (Only Spring) is written specifically dealing with the loss of his son. Google him if you want to read more about him.

So, tomorrow, Richard, Katie and I are going to take our dogs to a park for a long walk. Then, Katie and I are going to get our nails done, because we know Jacob would want us to do that. Then, we are going to go out to eat at a place he would like. We'll probably watch a movie that he would like. We're also going to listen to the song played at his funeral - the ending song from "Wicked" - "For Good." We'll also talk to Ben and if Tucker is in the mood, we'll Skype with him and read to him and Libby Kate. That always cheers us up. Nothing like grandchildren to make you smile. Ben and Beth do a good job of keeping Jacob's memory alive.

While our family will never be the same, I know that I would never have change the decisions we made 23 years ago to embark on this journey, despite the sad ending.

I don't quite know how to end all of this rambling so I'll end with the last line from "For Good:"

To my son,

Because I knew you, my life has changed for good,

I love you,
Mom