I had a dream...

I saw this in another blog today:

Grief is laughing with your children and wishing for the absent one to make the circle complete. Grief is crying in your car at stoplights. Some days grief makes you brutally honest; other days, grief muzzles you. Grief reconstructs your heart. Grief is sadness, hope, smiles and tears - rolled tightly like a snowball. Grief makes you search past the stars and the moon for Heaven. Grief strips you of everything you were pretending to be. Grief gives you new priorities. Grief opens hidden treasures from deep within your soul. Grief allows you to empathize more deeply with others who ache. Grief makes you unapologetically bold. Grief is a daily companion, best dealt with by admitting you do walk with it, even after all these years. Grief is the price of love; grief is a gift.

Early on in my pregnancy with Logan I had a dream. Well, nightmare really, though at the time I remember feeling more confused than anything. I don’t remember all of the details anymore since I tried to put it out of my mind and convince myself that I was being overly dramatic and paranoid…as usual. But the gist of the dream was that I went into labor at 6 months and there was blood and lots of people and I remember thinking that no one believed I was in labor, and then Logan died. I told my mom and David about this dream when it occurred. Sadly, the day Logan was born I remembered having that dream. And here I was, 2 days shy of 6 months pregnant and Logan really was dead, and I did go into labor (even if it was induced). And around the holidays a co-worker/friend of David’s who was also pregnant and about a month behind me had a miscarriage (at about 19 weeks or so) and I kept saying that I just couldn’t imagine loosing your baby that far into the pregnancy and how horrible it was. Ironic huh? David was afraid to tell me about it, probably because I had started feeling really scared that something terrible was going to happen to Logan or that he would die. And people were dying all around us. Co-workers parents, friends from high school, old youth leaders…every week or so during the holidays we got word that someone we knew had died. And I kept thinking to myself, who’s next? Logan was. And I think I knew it! I don’t think I’m one of those people who get premonitions or whatever, but I think deep down inside I knew he was going to die. After that Wednesday when they told me there was something wrong, most would assume Downs or some deformation…but I just kept thinking he was dead. Even in the wee hours Friday morning before our appointment at the hospital I didn’t feel him move, and I tried not to concentrate on it, but I knew he was dead. David said he did too. Why would anyone who’s ever had a healthy baby and a fairly uneventful subsequent pregnancy (other than a wrongly diagnosed case of early pregnancy Placenta Previa, which turns out was a contraction!) think their baby would die? Who thinks that way? And I kept saying that to myself when I was pregnant. “Knock it off! Who thinks this way?” and it turns out I was spot on. So now I wonder if from now on I’ll always fear that my dreams are premonitions. If I am ever blessed to create another life, will I always fear that they too will die? Will I worry myself so sick that I won’t be able to conceive again, or if by grace I do will I be so worried that I’ll miscarry or hurt that new innocent life? And now I am afraid I will suffocate my daughter, and my husband. I fear her death. I keep saying nothing could ever hurt more that this, but to be honest…it happening again, or loosing Aubrey or David…I’d curl up and die.