Tonight's picture was taken on September 7, 2008. Despite being in the hospital and battling cancer, Mattie's sense of humor and desire to have fun always came shining through. As was evident with this photo! That evening Peter blew up a couple of rubber gloves for Mattie and Mattie decided to push away the curtain to his room's window and look outside. However, the window did not look outside the building! It looked into the hallway of the PICU where the doctors, nurses, and other staff were bustling about! You can only imagine what people thought as they were passing by his room!!! Mattie was tapping on the glass with his rubber glove balloons and it was a sight that startled many people. Mainly because in the PICU typically you see children confined to their beds, intubated, and unconscious. In September of 2008, Mattie was only in the Hospital for a month by that point, but the staff quickly got to understand Mattie's antics and learned to appreciate him, his energy (because Mattie was UP AT ALL HOURS!!!), and his ability to express his thoughts and feelings.
Quote of the day: Memories are precious ... they help tell us who we are. ~ Katherine Applegate
AND...................................
I am not one who usually speaks about the virtues of TIME. In fact in most cases I hate time. Time doesn't help with grief. In fact in many cases, time makes grief worse. Time has a way of erasing memories (unless you work hard at keeping them alive). It can make the person you once loved seem more elusive (as if maybe that person never existed to begin with since it seemed so long ago!), it plays tricks on your mind, and overall, time has a way of making others in our lives forget the impact all of this has on us.
Yet the one advantage to time is it has shown me who is with me on my grief journey for the long haul. Who is committed and doesn't just view us as a chore, task, or burden. Naturally when we worked with Mattie's doctors, nurses, and support staff at the hospital, these providers were all required to work with us. However, now it is five years later. NONE of them are required to do anything for us at all. Yet many of our closet allies at Georgetown are still right beside us and to me they are my friends. Certainly they are professionals, but I see them for more than their titles and their roles. I see them for the human beings that they are, the beautiful people that day in and day out helped me care for Mattie and manage my own emotions, thoughts, fears, and crises. When you work with life and death issues, it is impossible for professional and personal boundary issues not to cross. It would have been impossible for Mattie's medical team members not to feel something deeply for us. None of them of course ever were anything other than professional with us! However, it is just like a mom knows her child, I could sense the emotional connections we were making with several of his care team members and I guess thanks to TIME, I NOW KNOW THIS IS CONFIRMED! We lost so much on September 8, 2009, I wouldn't have also wanted to lose that care network, since we did lose a great deal of our friends. It was bound to happen. I feared it would, I could see it could happen if I did not have a child, if I lacked the commonalities that bring moms together, but again, TIME was needed to prove my point.
So though this week represents Mattie's fifth anniversary of his death, it also represents a passage of time for Peter and I. A time to take stock of what has transpired in our lives over the course of these past five years. It is my hope that those who have been reading my blog understand that grief after losing a child doesn't stop after the first year. That it is on-going. In fact, I would say that each year that Mattie has been gone from our lives has been marked with different issues, problems, or feelings that arise. It is a constant balancing act and just when I think I have figured out grief something else arises that sets me back or causes me to have to readjust. Any case, I am signing off for tonight while staring at a big Mattie moon. Some things stay important and quite consistent across the five years.
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