Servicing the Front Range and High Country communities of Colorado, A Walk to Remember is a non-profit, all-volunteer organization focusing on bereavement care resources and support for those touched by all types of infant loss, including pregnancy loss, miscarriage, stillbirth, neonatal death or SIDS.
Just Keep Swimming
Written and read by Mandy Seely at the 2010 Walk
When my son T was a toddler we would go through these phases where one movie was constantly played in our house. Eventually he would grow tired of Brother Bear or Toy Story and we would be on to the next one. When Finding Nemo finally lost its shine, I can’t say I was sorry to see it go because I would catch myself humming Dory’s little diddy to just keep swimming, just keep swimming. Now years later I find that small fish was one wise soul. When the storm clouds of life start rolling in and the fear is paralyzing, I remind myself to just keep swimming and eventually I will find calm waters again. I am privileged to be a part of the MISS program, Mother’s in Sympathy and Support, and the other night at one of our meetings it hit me how apt the mantra of just keep swimming is when applied to us, parents who have lost children. We do not rejoice in our situation or thrive in the new reality that has been thrust upon us, and even when we really don’t want to, we just keep swimming.
We face circumstances all parents have hit their knees in prayer to avoid. We have heard silent heart Doppler’s, have seen still ultra sounds and have delivered babies who have not cried out. We have hoped it was our turn for a miracle even when the odds were against us, and mourned when that miracle did not appear. And we just keep swimming.
We sit through memorial services and funerals, try and find the perfect words for their headstones so the world can see how much this child was loved. Or we wear their ashes around our necks and have their little handprints on charms. We decorate our bodies with tattoos of their name or a symbol we associate them with, a visible permanent reminder they were here, and we just keep swimming.
We hunt down doctors and specialists to try and answer the “why” questions that have become our constant companion. We buy book after book trying to see if this was preventable, and no matter how often others try and convince us it wasn’t……… we wonder. And we just keep swimming.
We agonize because we weren’t better prepared for our time to be so short. We didn’t hold them long enough or maybe we didn’t hold them at all. We should have pictures of all their firsts, first smile, first tooth, first step, first day of kindergarten, but those aren’t the pictures we have. We regret decisions we made during that brief period we were able to share with them, because no matter what, it just wasn’t enough. But we did the best we could at that time, and armed with that knowledge, we just keep swimming.
We attend counseling or we join support groups. We watch friendships disintegrate, marriages struggle and loved ones worry. We eventually laugh about our grief cocktails or the forms of coping we all use to deal with our new normal. We start foundations, donate our time and resources in honor of our children so that other people recognize, no matter how much time has passed they are not forgotten. Their loss has forever changed us. Even though the world still sees the same person, we view the world through a different set of eyes. And we just keep swimming.
We cringe when people ask how many children we have. How to answer that? While wanting to honor our angels, not everyone is receptive to hear our stories, so we all have our different answers, “Two on earth and one in heaven”, “I have three living children”,
“I have four that walk and one that soars”…..no matter what answer we give, when we look at our family we see the spot where our child should have been, the hole in our family lining up with the hole in our hearts. But we keep swimming.
In the past I have poked fun that my way of coping was to lose myself in romance novels, and while they really did nothing to help me improve myself or gain knowledge, I did find this passage by J.R. Ward that struck a cord with me.
"It is hard not to feel part of a unique club that no one would ever volunteer to be associated with. Membership isn’t sought or desirable or something to crow about….but it is real and it is powerful: survivors of similar wrecks can see the horrors of those jagged shoals in the eyes of others. It is like recognizing like. It is two people with the same tattoo on their insides, the divide of a trauma that separates them from the rest of the planet unexpectantly bringing a pair of weary souls closer together." Lover Mine - J.R. Ward
We are survivors of a tragedy that no parent should be expected to endure. We are here on this beautiful Saturday morning to pay tribute to the children we have lost, to remind others that our babies are so precious to us and despite the fact that sometimes our burden seems too much to bear, in honor of them we will keep swimming.
As Tom Hanks said in Castaway,
"I have to keep breathing… For tomorrow the sun will rise. Who knows what the tide will bring?"
