~Updates  2007~

Four Years…. I don’t know why exactly but Darcy’s special days have impacted on me a lot more heavily this year.  Perhaps this is the first year I haven’t been trying to conceive or have just had a baby, so I have had more time on my hands (figuratively) to ponder what his life & death have meant to our lives, the molding of our existence from his presence.  As there will be no more children I have had to face the end of my childbearing years, my hopes unrequited and my dreams shattered, side-by-side with abounding joy and a feeling of pure blessedness.  I don’t quite know how to reconcile those two extremes but I am slowly learning that it’s all okay. Grief is a strange beast and it attacks people in different ways.

It was lovely, our very close friends & family remembered and sent messages of love – even from across the Globe as my darling friend Fiona emailed me.  I feel so lucky to have my fiercest & dearest friends by my side through my hard days, and my good. 

As we move all the time and time marches on, I find it really difficult to share Darcy’s story without feeling strange.  People seem to forget and expect you to do the same.  I don’t know, perhaps in the early days your need to share with everyone & anyone overcomes the looks on people’s faces and their strange reactions but now I feel as if it’s not something I can or want to share with everyone I know.  With new friends, there is a gulf of information about me that is not shared.  They know about Darcy and touch on it briefly but I am rarely asked questions and I rarely offer insight into how I am feeling.  But having said that, I am part of an online parenting site & I frequent the sewing boards as I find making beautiful things for my children & friends very fulfilling.  On Darcy’s Birthday I had two very special people send me messages.  And these are people I have never met – I have never even told them my story or elaborated on my grief, but they “get it”.

Because Darcy is not here, living and breathing, he seems to have ceased to exist and I feel a lot of people expect me to leave him in the past.  I can’t do that. I love him as intensely as my other three children.  He is my son.  I don’t know why that is so hard for other people to understand, but it seems to be that way.  It’s not about taking the pain with me, or defining myself by his death, but simply, I have four children, three on Earth and one who soars.  I don’t expect sympathy or even empathy as I know it’s hard if you have never been there, I just wish it wasn’t so hard to have him acknowledged.

The pain is not so raw now, and the grief not so all-consuming, it just comes to knock me over at some expected times (special occasions, Birthdays, Christmas) and some very unexpected times. 

Being so blessed as to have had two sub-babies, I can say they are worth all the anxiety but they don’t take away from my grief.  They fill my arms and my heart but there is always a “Darcy hole” – pun totally intended…..  I watch Cameron play with his sister and wonder if he’ll ever ask me why he doesn’t have a brother to play with.  As I tuck them in at night I pray that I’ll never have to bury another child,  that I will get to be surrounded by them into my old age.  The “what-ifs” go around my head and I sometimes try to imagine what he would have looked like as a Four year old.  Four is such a milestone, it’s the true end of babyhood and the beginning of tenuous steps into the World.  I wonder if he would have had his big sister’s legendary temper or if he would have loved trucks like Cameron.  Ah, such a slippery slope…..

I always approach my Updates from a perspective of a newly diagnosed parent – what would I want to know, if the Worst was to happen, how would this impact my ever after?  I have no advice, only to say that I never regret going down this road, it’s really hard work but I always think of the prize I got through all this – 2 days of memories and the sight of his precious face.  That acts as food to my shattered heart and sustains me through the dark days.   I hope that our story offers hope and an honest account to other families.  I have met some lovely people through HOH and I hope to get more involved as time goes by to offer a hand of friendship & a shoulder to lean on for other families in a similar situation.

Thank you for taking the time to read our story, it’s such a great outlet.