Birthday

This is a picture of James from my birthday last year. If anything, I imagine James was mildly surprised when at least one song was not sang directly to him. Possibly relieved.

Tomorrow is my birthday. I will be 28 years old. For perspective, that is 10,220 days. James lived 257 days, or roughly the rounding error between 10,220 and 10,000. When I was young, I made a point of celebrating my birthday as an event. Terrified of being lost in the cluster of holidays between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I made a big point of forcing everyone to celebrate my birthday independently, to recognize it as my own special day. I was a horribly selfish kid like that.

I don't want to celebrate this year. I've been lucky so far. Only my secretary noticed the sign in the break room at work. Friends and family I can limit to text messages, or better yet, facebook posts. When someone asks what I want, I direct them to James' fund. That tends to deflect them quickly from asking what I want to "do" for my birthday. I simply want the day to pass.

There's no achievement here. If anything, my birthday is a reminder of the fact that somehow despite all of my many mistakes, I'm really doing just fine. I will be completely ok this year, and probably the year after. Without trying particularly hard, I've managed a little over a quarter of a century on this Earth. Looking back on it, I've wasted a good many of those. I never really felt that way before. There was just no sense of urgency.

One of the "grief" e-mails I got today encouraged me to write about my anger "to unload some of that pressure." That's how my birthday makes me feel. I'm angry. I'm angry that I don't have my son to celebrate it with. I'm angry that I get to nonchalantly cruise through the years when he barely got months. I'm angry about the e-mails in my inbox directed to "James Sikes" wishing him a happy birthday and offering him a good deal on a birthday dinner or bottle of wine. I'm angry at myself for filling out the forms with my first name. I'm angry about all of the time I feel like I wasted when he was here away from him. I'm angry that he never really had a chance, after all we put him through. I'm angry I can't hear him laugh, and that I've memorized all the recordings I have of him laughing down to the second. Above all, I am angry without purpose, because I'm not prepared to deal with the alternative.

Some days are better. Some days I'm grateful for the time we had. And I am. I would never wish that James were not a part of my life. Holidays and events have an unfortunate tendency to remind me that he isn't, and focusing on that rarely ends well.

In other news, I'm slowly making way through the comments. I'm in June now. At this rate, I'll catch up with the current entries sometime next spring. Looking back, it's amazing how much support we had even in those early days. Thank you.

One hard day down, who knows how many to go

Well, I made it through my birthday.  I still feel so guilty for having a 28th birthday and James never had one.  Maybe I will feel like that every year?  I'm not sure. It's hard to think about spending another birthday without him.  Or another day without him for that matter.

I keep seeing this commercial.  It's for the American Cancer Society and it's Ricky Martin singing Happy Birthday.  Makes me cry every single time I see it.  (Maybe the part I should be crying about is that I actually saw Ricky Martin in concert...in Salt Lake City...with my 75-year old (at the time) grandfather.  Random much?!)

I am really dreading the next few weeks.  I feel like everytime I think about Jamesie's birthday, I have a slight panic attack.  I just honestly don't know what to do.  There is an event at the zoo that we will probably go to.  And then I guess we will go to the cemetery?  Last month on his 11 month birthday I took balloons to him.  One of my friends' sons had a birthday a few days before and she had gotten balloons for his birthday.  And it hit me that I had never bought him balloons.  He was never old enough to get one at the grocery store, or at a store in the mall.  So I had this overwhelming urge to get balloons and take them to him.

The balloons stayed there for a day or two.  I don't know why I needed to give him balloons.  Half the time I have no clue why I do anything.  I just keep thinking about what I was doing this time last year.  Last year I was huge and pregnant.  I was nervous/anxious/excited/filled with hope.  I was so ready for James to get here, and according to my count of when I wanted his birthday to be (October 3rd), he was already late.  October 3rd I was full-term, so I thought that of course he might as well come early and see the world!  Of course he didn't.  October 23rd rolled around and still no James.

I don't know which is worse- knowing that I never spent July17th through October 28th with him, or reliving the time between October 29th and July 16th.  Because I think about how this time last year I didn't even know him.  I didn't know his sweet smile.  His gorgeous hair.  His laid-back personality.  His love of the boobie.  His preference to be fully-clothed as opposed to naked for the first 6 months of his life.  How he slept through the night at 6 weeks old, and was fully swaddled until he started consistently rolling over at 3 and a half months old. 

I guess I'm about to find out which one is worse.  Living in a world full of daily James memories, or living with the days that there are no memories from that day.

I think accepting that this is going to be a rough month is part of it.  I'm just trying not to fight it.  It's going to be rough.  And eventually it will be over.  And then we'll move to the holiday season which is going to be extremely hard too.  Sometimes the thought of everything that is coming up is just so overwhelming. 

So if you'd like to make a donation to Jamesie's fund in honor of his Birthday, or if you would like to donate giraffes to children who need a smile, let me know!  I have an exciting announcement about the future of Jamesie's giraffes coming soon.... for a sneak peak head here!

And THANK YOU again for just reading my random thoughts.  Which they always are.  I'm grateful for those of you who care enough to read my ramblings....and for some reason it really helps me to process things!

Time

James lived eight months and seventeen days. That's 257 days. Today marks the one hundred eighth day since we were first admitted to children's. It is seventy seven days since he died. Life in the hospital was very brief relative to either of those periods, James spent just about twenty nights in the hospital between the time he first became ill and when he died, tucked into different floors and different rooms. A dizzying array of B6, C9, C11, PICU, C9, C10, PICU again. Tense days full of hurry up and wait, ventured opinions and slowly forming conclusions.

Sometimes, I still dream about it. I wonder if you would call them nightmares. It is the morning and I can't get James to wake up. I am begging for him to wake up, shaking him, calling his name, calling for help. No one comes. I go into the hall and make laps around the circuit. The nurse stations are empty, the on-call boards blank, without any of the cheerful flowers the nurses would draw. A mural welcomes you to the floor on each lap, splashes of color to break up the hospital's familiar pattern. Each floor has its own mural- the layout remains the same. No one is there, and a panic rises in me. I wake up, and still there is no one to help James.

The days pass with a different cadence now. When I make an appointment, I can be confident it will happen about when expected. There is a certainty that was never present in the hospital. The days are more regular and less varied. There is more predictability, but the surprises gone are about half and half. Bad surprises,like your son has cancer and needs an MRI today, are largely gone. The worst has already happen, there are no more horrible futures to contemplate. With them go good surprises too. Which of his teeth will come in next, what will his first word be? When will he walk? The watch for milestones ceases. There is simply much less to look forward to.

The days now have a regular, predictable quality. There is much less to update, and still less that is actually interesting. As much time as we spent terrified in the hospital, I still sometimes miss it. We still had hope. We still had things to look forward to with him. By its nature, the hospital is a place that suggests you still have options, treatments, hope. There is the opportunity for life however tenuous one diagnosis or another might make it. Away from there, here, is in many respects an admission that there is simply nothing left to be done. James is gone, and there's no hope of return in this life. I never thought much of heaven before. It seemed abstract to me, a reward without context. I still don't know much about it, but I know what I want out of it- James. I want to see my son again, and watch him grow into the man I'd hoped he would become. I now have context. There is hope in that, but an abstract sort, the kind that pales in comparison to the reality of you dead son's grave, or the crib sheets you wonder if you should bother changing, because of the dust that's gathering.

Today looked a lot like yesterday. Work, sleep, leisure crammed in the margins where possible. Tomorrow will look much the same. The days are more numerous but less important. I think of all the things I wrote in those daily updates, everything that happened. Some days I would write an entire update only to forget a full chunk of the day, hours and events that were sometimes the most important thing that happened. That time is compressed in my mind, a month that felt like a year. There is a huge divide in my life between before and after, and I cannot believe it. A few days after James died I remember I received a calendar reminder for some discovery deadlines for discovery I served a few days before James got sick. I remember looking at the note on my phone and just being shocked that 30 days ago my life was normal like that, and that 30 days later I was finished burying my son. It felt like much longer.

Some days are better than others. Some days I see the positives. The time we were blessed to spend with James, how honored we were to be his parents. He was our perfect blessing and we were lucky to have even eight months with him. Some days I am angry. Other days, I'm just trying to get through the day. Today was a good day. I found a set of James' newborn pictures in my desk. These discoveries are always a bit sad, but I like to look at his pictures and see him smile. He was such a happy boy. I couldn't have asked for anything more.

Thank all of you for your thoughts and prayers.