I break

Yesterday my husband and I were having a good morning. We woke up tired and worn, but we had plans and sincere motivation to fulfill them.

We started off easy with visits to cute shops with a mission to find special things to put in our son's memorial garden. We moseyed into a store selling board games and knick-knacks, aptly named Times Remembered. We picked up different games and reminisced about the memories they stirred up with the kind of excitement board games seem to bring out in people. 

Since the store was having a liquidation sale, there were a lot of random items on display, and no shortage of dusty, kitschy Christmas things for sale. The Christmas items pulled a sudden, unexpected, and very taught trigger inside of me. I couldn't bring myself to look directly at many of the items, but I also couldn't help but to sneak peeks. I was afraid of what seeing the things would do to me, even though I knew exactly what would happen.  But I just couldn't turn away.

Each sweet ornament and decoration I saw pulled me into dizzying flashbacks and flash-forwards at the same time. Last Christmas my husband and I were expecting our baby any minute, and talking daily about how this would be our last Christmas before our whole entire world would be changed.  We were expecting the change to be the birth of our baby, not of his death.

I saw a Baby's First Christmas ornament that I should have been buying this year, but won't be.  Palpable images flashed in my mind of how I would never be able to hold any of these ornaments in front of my son for him to explore with his curious eyes and slobbery mouth.  Last year I purchased clay with the specific intent to make tree ornaments out of our baby’s hand and footprints. We would make them after bringing him home from the hospital, and we would reflect on them year after year while trimming the tree as a family. We used that very clay to have the nurses make his footprints the day after he died.  Other than his ashes, they are now the only tangible form of his body I will ever have.

A figurine on one of the shelves has some lyrics to Silent Night printed on it. As I recall the lyrics the song takes on a whole new meaning to me.  My eyes well up in anticipation of the sobs that will heave through my body when I hear the song next Christmas. Will that happen while I am driving and the song comes on the radio? Will it happen when I am in our quiet home alone watching the Christmas lights twinkling on the tree? But the most vivid image of it happening is when I am in public, struggling to get away from everyone else’s Christmas cheer with the same success as a child blinded by panic in a terrifying and inescapable house of mirrors.

I try to escape the reality of the Christmas section by masterminding with calculated frenzy how I might be able to disappear this year for the holiday. Is it possible to get a free exit from living, even just for that month?  The dated, dusty Christmas things are hidden all over the store, startling me at every turn and making my heart beat as rapidly as it sinks. It reinforces my previous hunches that I won't be able to bear December. Last year that month was when the anticipation of our baby was building to its highest. Come January, it was all suddenly ripped away with a devastation I am still trying to wrap my head around.

I stop and stare at a fake Christmas tree.  It is right in front of my face but seems so far away at the same time.

I feel myself cracking.

I turn the corner, and there it is: a row of Batman onesies, all discounted 50% off. I feel another flashback of being an excited expecting mom who can't even bear the cuteness, let alone the discount. Ripe with pregnancy, I would buy it, vibrating with excitement from the anticipation of taking cute pictures of my baby in the cutest outfit.  My baby isn’t even out yet.  I don’t even know if it is a boy or a girl!  But I know it would be soooooo cute in this outfit! I can’t wait until it’s out! I just can’t stand the wait anymore! All these outfits are so adorable it makes me squeal!

Flash forward to an emptiness inside that is heavier than my body itself.  I will never see my big baby's fat legs kick in a onsie sized for a 12 month old. I only got to see his legs twice. Once when I held him for the first time, and once more when I saw him for the last time ever. 

I walk by more baby clothes. My heart isn't strong enough to look, but it longs enough to steal surreptitious glances.  Ballerina outfits.  A cowboy suit.  Everything is little, cute, and begging joy.

I start to split.

I don’t know why, but I walk behind it all to a shelf with baby shoes. I see it’s already too much for my husband and he leaves the area. I should have gone with him.  But like a person in a sick trance who doesn't want to burn the image of a brutal wreck in her mind, but feels a deeper possession to move in close to see the truth, I run my hand over each pair of shoes. They stop at a pair of yellow fuzzy duckie slippers. The orange toes look just like a duckling's webbed feet. Duckies were one of my son's themes while pregnant, and one of the images we use now to remember him. Earlier this month we got a new flock of ducks to add to our farm, a symbol of honoring his life among ours. We picked out a special duckling within it to honor him specifically, but it died very soon after we brought it home.  We imagined that duck was indeed a very special one and our son wanted her so badly that he took her soul to become his first pet heaven. We buried her body with some of our son's ashes under our son's memorial pear tree.  We wanted their bodies to be together forever and to continue to give new life, just like their souls.

I pick up the duckie slippers and imagine my son's feet in them. I have the perfect image of what they would look like, even though I will never, ever be able to see my son's feet again.

I stand in the corner of a musty store going out of business, holding onto a pair of small duckie slippers, yet barely hanging on.

I break.