Nothing will ever be the same. I’ve known this
for a while, but I think it’s just starting to sink in…almost 8 months after the
moment that ensured that nothing would ever be the same. People say this all the time without
really thinking of everything that “nothing” entails. For me, it really does include everything. I make brownies, and I think of
Max. He would be almost 9 months
old. Would I let him try a little
piece of the brownies? Probably
not because I made peanut butter brownies, but that leads me to realize that I
wouldn’t have made peanut butter brownies if Max were alive since it’s
generally thought to be unsafe to give peanuts to young children who could have
a severe allergy to peanuts. That
leads me to realize that my life is totally different in even the smallest of
ways. I made peanut butter
brownies in my real life, but I made regular brownies in my “fake” life, the
life that I sometimes feel that I should
be living. These things happen all
the time. They happen every day,
hundreds and maybe even thousands of times a day. Every time I buckle Ethan into his booster seat, I see the
empty seat next to him. Max’s car
seat should be there. I should be
racing to the other side of the car in the cold weather to get Max into the car
while Ethan gets settled into his seat.
But I’m not. I’m just
buckling Ethan in. When I get home
from school and sit on the couch, I think that I should be getting Max out of
his car seat and probably changing his diaper. I should be putting him into a highchair that (thankfully)
we don’t have and giving him something to snack on. What foods would he like? His personality was already very different than Ethan’s, so
I often think that he wouldn’t like the foods that Ethan liked as a baby. I think that we would have had fun at
the grocery store picking out new foods for Max to try. I think that he would have smiled and
laughed when I showed him some of the strange-looking fruits in the store. Maybe he would have demanded to try
some of them, and then I would have learned something new—how to cut and serve
something new, a dragon fruit, for instance. Maybe I would have liked dragon fruit too. In those ways, my life would be
different.
It
means something a little bit different for nothing to ever be the same
though. It means that shopping for
diapers will never be as mindless as it once was, smiling at a young child
won’t be as natural as it once was, and watching TV shows or movies will never
be as easy and innocently entertaining as it was before. Even TV shows remind me of Max. Last night, we watched one of our
favorites, Sons of Anarchy. If you’ve seen this show, then you
would probably recommend it to us as a pretty effective distraction. How in the world would a show about a
motorcycle gang remind me of my innocent little baby who probably never even
got to hear a motorcycle in his short life? In the episode, a man finds his dad dead. His screams and pleads to his dad to
wake up reminded me of my own upon realizing that Max was dead. I understood entirely what that
character was thinking—I knew that my
son was dead, but there is a part of me that wouldn’t allow it to be possible
yet. We live in a world where
almost anything can be fixed; certainly my baby can be fixed, I naturally
thought. I could hear myself
screaming, but it was the sort of mindless screaming that is more of an impulse
than a planned reaction. I’d only
seen that in movies before, and now I understand that people familiar with
death must have been the ones to first coach actors on how to portray it. In another scene of this episode, the
dead man’s body is cremated. Max
was cremated, so the connection there is pretty obvious. Unfortunately, watching the scene
forced me to consider things that I’ve been able to force out of my mind
before—the heat, what the flames must have done to his perfect body before it
turned to ashes, how the person operating the crematorium must have felt to
watch such a small box be reduced to so few ashes, how horrible it all really
is, and how I can never again watch a scene like this without thinking of
Max. Cooking will never be the
same (what would I be making for Max, what dish would he have requested on his
birthday every year, etc.), reading the news will never be the same (I can
relate to the sadness and tragedy that many articles contain, I can’t be an
uninvolved observer in some cases anymore), getting ready in the morning will
never be the same (I should be waking up earlier, I should be taking breaks to
help Max get ready, I should be leaving earlier to drop him off at daycare),
even getting the mail will never be the same (I would be pushing Max in a
stroller to the mailbox, we wouldn’t be getting mail for Max’s foundation, and
Babies R Us mailers wouldn’t be so hurtful). This is what people mean when they say that their lives have
changed so much that nothing will
ever be the same. It means that
they can longer do anything without thinking in some way of the loved one who
is no longer here. It means that I
can’t function without thinking of Max and that simple things are made more
difficult by reminders of what is missing. Things like walking up a set of stairs are more difficult
because I remember what it was like to hold Max while walking up those
stairs. I remember how careful I
was and how I thought with horror of all of the potential accidents that could
happen on those stairs if I wasn’t very careful while holding him.
We
did something yesterday that seems simple, something that parents do all the
time for children who are still alive and growing—we put away some of Max’s
clothes. Obviously, this is made
difficult by many factors, not the least of which being that Max is dead, so we
won’t be replacing the old clothes with new, bigger ones. We’ve been working on a plan for Max’s
room with our counselor, and we have already decided that most of Max’s things
will go into storage. We aren’t
ready to make any permanent decisions regarding his things, so they will all
stay here with us for now. If we
decided in five years to donate his clothes, then so be it. For now, though, we just cannot stand
the thought of another child, even our own, wearing clothes that belong to
Max. We started in the closet
where there is a dresser full of clothes that Max never got to wear, clothes
that are bigger than he was. It
wasn’t easy to see those clothes.
I remember buying some of them and receiving others as gifts. I remember picturing Max wearing them as
an older baby. Those clothes, in a
way, represent the hopes and dreams that we had for Max, the future that we
thought we could guarantee him.
They represent everything that I still feel was unfairly and unjustly
ripped from him and from us. They
represent the anger that I still have and the confusion and the frustration and
the loss. But I’m glad we started
there because it only got worse.
When we moved to Max’s changing table, I was a little surprised to find
the bottom drawer still full of his clothes. These were the clothes that fit Max and that he still
wore. I don’t even know what to
say about this drawer other than it was hard and emotional and I’m glad it’s
done. I did pull some things aside
to keep more accessible than the others:
a blanket embroidered with Max’s name, a few of my favorite onesies, the
outfit that Max wore home from the hospital (shirt, shoes, hat), and a tiny
little “Peepee Teepee” that we learned to use since Max was a bit unpredictable
during diaper changes. Finally, we
took the bedding off of Max’s crib and put that in a container with the
clothes. In all, we filled up two
containers before we decided to call it a night. We both needed a break, so we took one. We still have a lot to do, but I feel
good that we at least started it.
Cleaning Max’s room and getting it ready for another baby is a task that
has been hanging over my head, waiting to be finished. Starting it at least gets us closer to
finishing than we ever have been before.
Still, it feels as if packing up Max’s room is just one more way to say
goodbye to him and to make him a little less accessible in our lives. It is one more way in which I realize
the impact of Max’s life and death and that, truly, nothing will ever be the
same.
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