Making a Home for Grief

Here’s the thing they don’t always tell you about grief: it requires you to make friends with it before you can “heal” from it.

I put “heal” in quotations because as grieving people know, it’s a bit of a misnomer; you don’t really heal from grief; it merely evolves as time passes. There’s also never point where you are fully free from it.

It’s been two and a half years since the worst day of my life, when I heard my son’s last breaths and the shrill flatline that haunts my dreams. For the first few months, I couldn’t eat, shower myself, or brush my own teeth. If my husband, family, and friends hadn’t rotated keeping a watch on me, I would not be here today, so great was my desperation to join my Ren.

I barely remember that first year.

But the intensity after the immediate loss did lessen over time. Eventually, I could find myself thinking of things other than his death. Eventually, I could notice fleeting moments of muted happiness. Eventually, I could peek out of the shell I was in and interact with other people again.

Today as I’m writing this, my almost-four-month-old daughter sleeps beside me. She’s our miracle quadruple rainbow baby, and while her arrival introduces new layers of grief, she also brings joy, an emotion I didn’t think I could feel again.

My therapist asked me shortly after her birth, “Do you think her existence has brought some healing for all the losses?” (not just Renley, but also the four babies lost to miscarriage).

I answered that I didn’t think her birth healed the losses, just as one baby can never replace another. However, she does bring a layer of happiness, so that the moments of gladness come more readily.

It’s a strange space to live in—one where deep sorrow coexists with profound joy.

Everything I read about grief tells me I’m supposed to grow around it; the anguish never goes away. Each day, I move further away from that day, but instead of “healing” the way I once thought of the term (reaching a point where the pain no longer exists), I notice it more.

I didn’t only lose Ren at one point in the past. I lost him in my present, and his absence echoes into my future. He’s missing in all aspects of my life that he should have been a part of. I think often of how much he would have loved his baby sister, the way he loved his little brother, who still talks about him to this day though he was only three when Ren passed. I think of how proud Ren would have been of me for pursuing my dreams the way we always talked about.

No matter where I go tomorrow, and the tomorrow after tomorrow, he will always be missing.

If I focus on eradicating the pain, I will drive myself insane with the futility of such an attempt. There is no escaping this. There is no going back to who I was before. Grief has made a home in me, and I must accept its residency.

And ironically, that is the only way I can keep going.