One Month

It's been one month since we had to say goodbye to a piece of our heart. I don't know why certain milestones carry such weight, but for some reason, hitting that one month marker feels so momentous. Maybe it's just part of being human. Our entire lives revolve around time, every day. We use time as a ruler for emotion, we tell those who are hurting or grieving "Time heals" or "Give it time". The thing with time though its that there's never enough of it, especially when it comes to time spent with someone we love. I truly, with my entire heart, believed Mason would be okay. I saw our lives with him. I pictured him this Christmas, my family of four in front of a Christmas tree, smiling and laughing because our miracle baby was home for the holidays. I saw us next summer celebrating his first birthday, reflecting on the roller coaster ride that it was to get him here. I felt it in the depth of my soul that we would have more time. Then suddenly, we didn't. Time ran out on us. It began with waking up to an early morning phone call. "How soon do you and your husband think you can get here? Drive safely, but you need to hurry." Driving to the hospital, knowing that the clock is ticking. Feeling the need to walk faster, move quicker, yet wanting everything to just stop because once we get there, once we're in that NICU, it's real and reality is making it hard to breathe. Walking through the double doors and down the hall to the NICU still feels like a dream. I knew from the phone call from the doctor that this was the day we had prayed would never come. From the moment my water broke, I had been given the option to let my baby live or die. I always knew that was not my decision to make, nor was it one that I felt I could ever actually make. You read or hear stories about people having to take their loved one off of life support and you think "Oh my gosh, that would be so hard" and let me tell you, it is, but it also isn't. I never thought I would be able to say that. We walked into Mason's room and saw him for the first time that morning and he looked so different. He was a light shade of purple, his face was swollen, and you could see all his little veins through his skin. My baby was sick. Before this, when we had been told he was sick, it felt so distant because he looked so healthy. He was growing, he was gaining weight, he looked perfect. But today, the sickness had crept to the surface and we could see it. We were taken out of the room to talk to the doctors. I don't even remember everything they said to us. It was like an out of body experience. I could hear another baby crying and thinking "I am never going to hear my baby cry." We were presented with two options: we could hold and love on Mason and let him pass peacefully in our arms and remove him from the ventilator, or we could wait for him to essentially go into cardiac arrest. We saw his chest x-ray from that morning, with both lungs almost fully collapsed. He had no urine output since the night before. My baby was suffering. You think it'll be a hard choice when you're asked whether you want to end life support, but the thought of your baby suffering is enough to make that decision an easy one. From that moment on, time was all we could hold onto. Our families got to come in and say their Earthly goodbyes. Mason's big sister got to sing to him and hold him. And for the second time in my life, I held my baby as a doctor with a stethoscope told me "He's gone." You hear those words and you can feel your entire world shift to the before and the after. Like I mentioned before, we like to tell people that "time heals all wounds". I can tell you right now, there are some wounds that time does not, nor can it, heal. Some wounds simply become easier to manage with the passage of time. I think every day, I wish I had one more day, one more hour, just one more minute. One month has passed and we're just one month closer to being together again.