I wrote this a year ago, it was so hard to write but I needed to get it all out. I thought I would share this, it's very hard to read even now, but it is an honest look at the grief and shock I endured...
White Box
I sit in my wheelchair awaiting the car that will take me home and strip me of the place where I said hello and goodbye (for now) to my baby son Ryan. The rain is pouring down, odd for an August day. It’s raining because God is sad I begin to think, sad for my heartbreak that is. The rain looks like the tears that flow down my cheeks and unto my lap. I’m wearing an ugly outfit and no shoes or socks. I have on a big grey sweater and red sweat pants. It’s the only thing comfortable to wear over my incision and the pad that protects it from my clothes. Even the touch of clothes to my cut stings bad. In my lap I’m holding a white box. What a horrible picture this is because I’m holding all that I have left of my baby’s short life here in this hospital.
There’s a smaller blue box inside the bigger white one that holds the blanket his body laid on in his incubator, his hand prints and footprints and pieces of his feathery black hair. His medical bracelets are in a zip lock bag, they read, “Baby Boy Tracy” because it took us a couple days to name him the perfect name. There’s also the thermometer we used on him, a tiny diaper of his, a nose suction thing, and a white outfit they put him in after he passed in that zip lock bag. I have some pictures that the nurse took, lots of cards people gave us in the white box, along with the big white blanket my friend made me that I held Ryan in for the first time and where he passed away in, in my arms. This is all we have of his life and these things will be cherished and treated like rubies or gold and all precious things, almost like untouchables.
How pathetic, how sad as I sit in a wheelchair, handicapped by my surgery, my hair is a tangled mess, I couldn’t recognize myself if I had a mirror. My eyes are puffy and dark. My face pasty white, lips cracked. I have a strong grip on this white box, I never want to let it go, it’s all I have! It will give me my memories back when I start to forget, if I ever forget. The smell of my baby is all around the things in this box. I pull the big white blanket to my sore nose and breathe in heavily, Ryan feels so close, just a breath away, literally. More tears flow as each breath of his scent off this blanket tear at my heart. My eyes begin to sting, my body shakes, and I pray that this blanket never looses Ryan’s scent. I know better because it probably will soon and that makes me even sadder. I never want to forget his sweet scent. I wish I could put it in a bottle and wear it as perfume, just like if he were alive and his scent would be all over me because of me holding him constantly.
I see the black car pull up. I’m wheeled towards the pouring rain, towards hard and depressing dark days of heartache to come. Wheeled away from my home and life with Ryan, the hospital that changed my life forever and that helped deliver my son alive, and that still holds my son’s beautiful body now. Every inch away from the hospital, the further I get from my baby, and the deeper my heart aches and rips apart. I get into the car, barely, there’s so much pain. I hold on tight to my box and we drive away. I will never forget. I will always come back to visit this place. I never want to sit in a wheelchair again. My box on my lap is all I have left, it’s all I want, I will look at these heavenly treasures everyday I promise myself through the pounding rain. My son’s life on earth… in a box, his life now in heaven is endless. I breathe in, and breathe out.
~ October 20, 2008
