Remembering My Nightmares Are Real

I just finished watching a movie.... it was supposed to be your average chick flick, or so I thought. Very quickly I realized that there was a familiar element to this drama... a baby had died. Within the first 10 minutes of the movie, it tells us of this history, but I kept watching, convinced that it was a one time "thing"? (sure it'd come up a little later, but lightly... right?) ...

wrong.

As the story unfolds, flashbacks occur, and I find myself wrapped in these scenes that I can't shut out. The main character had so many emotional problems surrounded by her baby's death. She kept flashing back with what happened, facing the present with people's ignorant accusations and hurtful conversations. She would lash back at them with blind hate, all because she refused to see anything or anyone outside of her. I know this. I know her hate. I know her grief. I know her wandering.

There was a scene where she was flashing back to her last moments with her baby girl. She was nursing and fell asleep. She awoke with her baby still on her chest, but to her dreadful surprise, her baby wasn't breathing. The scene showed her panic when she realized this and she desperately tried to get her to breathe. Then she came back to present time, carrying a guilt that she must've killed her baby by accident. I know her guilt. I know her suffocation.

There was another scene later where a doctor looked over the autopsy report, per her husband's request after he had learned of his wife's guilt, so she might finally be free of it. The doctor assured her with every trace of evidence, that she, in fact, did NOT kill her baby. She said there is always evidence of suffocation or smothering, and there was nothing, that's why they deemed it SIDS. This poor mother cried with great relief and heart ache all over again. I know her relief. I know her shredded heart.

The movie ended.

I turned the tv off with tears still in my eyes from bursts of crying. My husband, the only person in the whole wide world that knows the exact heart ache I feel, (with a sigh of pity that I stumbled on such a movie), takes my hand and kisses it.

I really should be in bed. It's really late. But I've been taken back to one of my most desperate times, and having trouble bouncing back to present day.

 It will be 7 years this year. Her birthday's around the corner. My heart, right now, aches as if it's only been 7 weeks, maybe even 7 days. There's just some things you never forget. The way she smiled. The way she felt. The love. That last moment with her. The shock. The trauma. The lost-ness. The screaming. The endless tears. The hate. The denial. The guilt. The relief. The wandering.

Not many know this, but I'm still working on separating Christmas and her death. There's still things I work through that keep my journey continuing. To learn how to live with the grief.

7 years. The world thinks that it's been enough time for me to move on and breathe easy. There's no truth in that. I was reassured tonight that I can be brought back "there" in a second. and I'm still sitting here trying to catch my breath.