Dear Abram

It’s been 7 years. It feels like both forever ago, and like surely that much time has not passed since we held your sweet, tiny self earthside. Not even a pound. Hands barely the size of our fingernail.

Sometimes I feel a bit angry and bitter, even about the time passing. How dare time march forward? How dare life continue on? What was once so raw, sharp, and painful has softened. This helps the pain, but makes the details of exactness become blurry, fuzzier around the edges. I hear people who have lost a loved one say this often – “I don’t want to forget.” Their voice, a smell, the feel of their hands.

Sometimes I feel angry that I don’t even have those.

Just the tiny kicks in my belly. The flannel blanket holding you. Sheaff’s forehead pressed to mine. The hospital room where people surrounded us with love and cried with us. The barely existent weight of you.

Thank god someone told us to take pictures, because I am so thankful to page through the scrapbook every year. Answering the kids’ questions about why you look so small and different and why your skin is a bit translucent and red. Those photos usually take me back to what it was like holding you. It comes into focus again.

It’s interesting, isn’t it? The hardest night of our life is also so sacred, so treasured, because it was our only one with you.

As it does if one sits with the feels, anger usually lifts like a fog. The light burns it off. And we are left with what is real around you. Sadness exists there, adamantly. Grief for your short but mighty life. An ache for what we don’t get with you. Hurting, when we imagine what you’d look like at 7. What two brothers would look like. What your voice would sound like. If you’d be as funny and goofy as your siblings (of course you would). Adalyn, Bria, and Bryce feel certain you love trains. They don’t quite understand the spiritual part, but I know they are connected to you, so we believe them. Trains and dogs, they say.   You are loved by these three – two sisters and a brother, earthside, who think and talk of you so often. I’m not sure how, but I know we’re all together, the six of us, sometimes. The tops of mountains, the edges of twilight’s glow on the shore, that sort of beautiful thing.  I hope we’re always connected by our family’s thread, but in those moments, I really feel it; it becomes warm and glowing. I know you visit others in our family too  like Evergreen Cove with Pops.  I certainly picture you surrounded by the grandparents – Grandma and Grandad, Papa, Jean, Oma & Ivy, Rhilda and Abram – whose gentle voice on a tape from decades ago gave us the idea for your name, and Eccles as your middle, your family who holds you constantly in their hearts. I hope the grands dote over you in this other world. I know they do.

Your story is 7 years old, told many times. But sometimes I have to stop and remember what your life truly did for us. The friendships that you brought us, that you deepened with a compassion and understanding we all felt so strongly through your story. The gratitude for what gets lost in cliches so often… a grounding in what matters. You taught us healing, and kindness, and empathy. That stormy skies often cast the most beautiful, magical light.

Our hearts will always have a hole in them for what could have been, what should have been. Our hearts will always ache for our first little boy. But above all, I’m grateful that you are ours. That your life has brought more light into this world. That your heartbeat is among us.

I love you, and I miss you every day, sweet baby boy.

All my heart,

Mama