Four Years Old

My little boy is four years old tomorrow.  It is so hard to wrap my mind around this...that it was four years ago tonight that I was so anxious to meet our newest gift from Heaven.  And yet it was so hard to believe that this tragedy even happened to us back then.  Now, it is all we have....if we don't hold onto this event, there is nothing to hold onto.  I remember after losing Chase (and I think I have said this in more than one post), one thing that hurt the most was never being congratulated when he was born.   It's those automatic phrases or words that come out of one's mouth for certain occasions and because Chase was so critical after delivery and then died just four days later, no one could say those words to me.  It wasn't that I was angry at people for it--who would say congratulations to a woman who never got to bring her baby home from the hospital?  It was the mountain of "should-have-beens" that I was heading for that this was kicking off.  Such simple words.  Yet unspoken because they were not appropriate.  And there were times that I was walking around shortly after Chase's birth, mothering a child in Heaven now, that I would have loved to have heard those words.  They would have sent me right into an ocean of tears, but I still would have loved to have heard them.  I was still his mama.  I still proud for having given birth to such a cute, healthy-looking baby, minus all the tubes.  But congratulations are hardly in the mind at a time like that.  And to even say that I was feeling like that is a little embarrassing.  

I miss him.  We all do.  We miss him as much today as we did the day he left us.   I wish so badly I could get a glimpse of what he looks like in my mind.  But I still think of him running around, playing with his siblings, sitting on my lap, just being part of this family.  And how we would be having a birthday party for him, probably SpiderMan or Dinosaur Train, cake and blowing out candles.  Reese.  Reese was this age exactly when Chase died.  And that's when it hits me.  Time seems so measurable when I put an image of Reese in my head from those days surrounding Chase's birthday and gone to heaven day.  Sitting next to me on the pew listening so intently to what the preacher was saying about his baby brother.  Reese grew up a lot that day and and that's how I see Chase.  Quiet and ahead of his years.  Like he knows more than we do.  I'm sure he does.

We have talked about our day tomorrow and how we plan to celebrate his birthday.  I'll post pictures tomorrow, or at some point.  But it is with such a heavy heart that I look forward to this day and these days ahead.  Even after four years, I force the smiles, as we all do.  Only Owen will be able to be truly happy.  And from this we will all be able to smile.  A gift from Chase, I'm sure of it.  So we hold hands and we hold each other in our hearts and this is how we make it through time....until we are all together again.