No traces
It hasn’t even been a full two weeks yet and already you can hardly tell I was pregnant. My body is nearly healed from the rigors of birthing, and all traces of my brief motherhood are vanishing like fog under the sun. My gratefulness for the ease in which my body handled the physical stresses is as double-edged as a sharpened sword, for soon there will be nothing left of my son’s brief existence. Soon, he will merely be an intense memory shared only by my husband and myself, subject to the fading of time.
How sad I feel at that admission. There should be more to a legacy than an intangible memory. Old folks who pass leave much; inheritances, stories, history… All my son was able to leave us with was my altered body — which is quickly metamorphosing back into the body I had before. I used to be the girl who stressed over my curves and stomach “pook” — now I find myself wishing I could keep my pook just so I can remember the beautiful son I carried. So he doesn’t disappear completely…
We have begun packing things away. Our room is slowly being divested of baby accessories. And again: I am loathe to put it all in storage for then who’s to say he didn’t ever exist? Once all traces vanish, he’s just a memory. A box of assorted cards and photos and mementos from the hospital. A dream that never turned into reality.
And yet, maybe it’s not so cut and dried. My husband and I chose to donate his organs, and so somewhere out there, some other parents get to keep their children. That would be our son’s tangible legacy… the physical lives of these other children. Unfortunately, it is a legacy we will likely never see. To us, our son will always be a memory. A beautiful, painful, heart-squeezing, all-together-too-short memory.
We are in the process of planning his wake. It won’t be a traditional wake, as his precious life was too short to end with the sharing of many stories by people he’d touched, but I know he loved music and so, there will be music. I want to write him a song, but everything is so fresh and raw I can’t put it down yet… so I am learning Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven.” I don’t know if I will be able to sing well on such an emotionally-charged day, but I am going to try to sing for my boy.
