This is a guest post written for inclusion in the Pregnancy Loss Week Blog Carnival.  Please join us at Fertility Flower for the week of August 23-27, 2010 where we will be featuring articles, posts and artwork about pregnancy loss.

By Treina Witherwood (Kyung Combs)

         When our dream is to have a child and we begin to plan and make ready for the hopeful arrival of a new family member, there are things we could never imagine happening to us. When he opens his eyes and looks up at us, there are a million dreams swimming around in our heads. Even when the child is born premature and extremely tiny, we marvel at how perfect his nose or his ear is. We go into a state of shock, knowing that we must protect our child, but that there is no way to do so, we must now put all our trust into the nurses or doctors which we have never met and do not know. It puts a heavy weight on the heart.

            And when he closes his eyes for the last time, to never open them again, everything stops. Our entire world has been reduced to less than rubble. Yet something happened to me in that very instant, my eyes opened. I understood the true value of life, all life. For the first time in my life, I was able to look at all of the terrible experiences and cherish them. I understood that every single life experience is sacred, no matter how terrible it may seem, for each experience is mine and mine alone. Yes, many other people have lost children, but I will never know how it truly feels for them, as every single one of them experienced it in a one of a kind way. This means that each life experience we go through is something to cherish. For my son and many other children will never get to experience anything. I cherish the ten days I spent with my child, and although it was a tragic thing, and most of his life was pain filled and true agony, he got the chance to experience more life than those who have been mis-carried or still born. I truly understood how precious each day was when I held him in my womb month after month, when I held his tiny body close to my bosom and whispered how beautiful he was.

            When I cried and called out to him after he left, I cried for the scrape on his knee he would never get when playing with friends. I cried for the times with his dad, I cried for the love of a wife he would never experience. I cried for the broken heart which he would never receive from his first love.

            I suddenly understood that even though he was gone, I still had a duty to him. My duty was to love life and every experience I get the honor of witnessing. To cherish all that he was taken from and be grateful for my life and his, no matter how short. Guilt and hopelessness do their part to try and keep me from achieving this. As any parent I imagine that the unspoken guilt of their child passing away is one that goes very deep. I could do nothing to save my child, yet deep in my gut I feel like I should have done something, even though there was nothing I could do but watch. This is where the confusion leaks in to try and feed the guilt and hopelessness. Perhaps it is not meant to be understood. The death of a child is one that cannot be made sense of no matter how hard you think and stay in that dark depressing place.

            I cried for three days after he died. On the first day I cried, I cried for the injustice of it, for the experiences he lost and the life that was taken from him. On the second day I cried for the sheer fact that it could not be understood. How can a child die? How could he die? On the third day I had almost convinced myself that as his mother, he deserved someone to weep for him, only him and I cried for him and my selfishness. On the next day, I decided that it was not the way to live the life I was given, especially when his was now gone. That is not to say I didn’t cry many times after that, but the crying was not the same. It was controllable. I needed to live a full life, for him. He had opened my eyes to how amazing life is and that any minute of it should not be wasted. For the short ten days that he lived, he taught me more about life than I could have ever imagined and although every day I wish he was here by my side, I thank him for everything he gave me during the short time he did spend with me.

Thank You Arawn!