Boogers on the Wall

It has been the coldest winter that I can ever remember yet somehow I feel warmer than I have in a really long time.

Don’t get me wrong, I still wear my moon boots with my pajama pants to take the kids to school and I sit under an electric heated lap quilt most of the day. I’m not talking about being warmer physically.

I’m talking about warming up emotionally.

Somehow the giant piece of ice that froze around my heart when Luca died has slowly been melting.

Bit by bit it gets easier for me to deal with his loss. My heart is thawing and so is my anger and bitterness.

I’m not saying that I am forgetting my son who would turn 3 this April. Coping with the grief that has come with his loss is still an uphill battle I will continue to fight. But I’m slowly starting to realize that my life can be warm and happy even though he can’t be in it.

I was horrified when someone told me that time heals all wounds. Now, I am wondering if that’s partially true. Although I will forever carry the scar, I think my wound is slowly healing.

How can I tell that I’m thawing? I finally feel like living again.

For a long time I didn’t want to do anything. My life was all about making it through the day, the hour, the minute.

Now I want to run, chase and tickle my kids. I want to learn how to cook apple pies and warm, fluffy rolls. I want to imparare italiano. And I want to stay up late reading, learning and growing.

Every once in a while an ice piece will chip off and I’ll feel a chill again. Like when I start sewing tiny baby gowns to donate to other families who will experience a loss. Or when I hear on the news that Utah might ban wish lanterns. Or I visit a tiny rectangular headstone with my baby’s picture in the top right corner.

It’s then that I remember how cold my loss has made me. How lonely I am to see my baby again, if only for a moment.

But in a strange, unexplainable way, I am grateful for those ice chips. They remind me that Luca was real. They remind me that I am real.

Sometimes I get so busy wrapped up in my daily life that I stop and question if delivering my baby stillborn was all just a horrific nightmare.

Those sudden chills remind me that I am human and that I lost something I wanted deeply.

But those chips, while they chill me to the core, come and go. And while his loss was once all consuming, it is much less so now.

Much of my sorrow has transformed into curiosity. I think of my baby often and wonder what he would be like.

Would he love sharks like my oldest son? Would he dress as Peter Pan and challenge his 4-year-old Hook-loving brother?

Would we be fighting him to wear underwear and grow out of his pacifier? Would he cuddle to me during naptime?

Sometimes I sit back and day dream that he would do all of those things. And though thoughts of what Luca would have been like remind me of his absence, they also make me smile.