Day 30: Your Grief, Tell the World

My son died. I can say that now. My struggle with grief has been long and hard, as I'm sure any other baby loss mom would say.

My road of grief is one that I cannot turn away from, but I've chosen to stop when I needed to stop and continue on when I needed to continue. Sometimes I've been travelling on my road with blinders on, and that's ok. I've gone through "the fog" and I've come out the other side. I've gone through the valley of lows and I've come out the other side. Many times along the way I've simply chosen to pretend that my road is not one of a grieving mother, and that's ok too.
For me, there have been many times that I've needed to pretend that it didn't happen to me. When I've come out of those periods of time, I have always felt a little worse for momentarily "forgetting" but I know that it's ok. I think that sometimes, we just can't handle things so we need to push them aside for a little bit. Then when we can better handle things, we'll come back and "deal" again. At least, that's how my road has been. I've been sad when thinking about Landon, I've pretended like it didn't happen to me, and sometimes I can now smile when thinking about my son.
Not every baby loss mom will follow the same road as I follow; we each travel the road of grief, but each road is our own and while we can help each other along the way, we must each travel our own road all by ourselves. We must choose to continue moving or get sucked in by the valleys. Our friends can try to help us, but it's our choice. I'd bet most of us wish we could just jump to the end and "be ok again" but that's not how it works... we have to travel our road, we have to experience our grief.

Day 30 is Your Grief - Tell the World. I'm going to continue this blog "exploring" different topics along the way, this is how I'm going to "tell the world". It is such a healing experience for me and I can't see just stopping. I need to carry this along my road with me. My grief exists solely because of the death of my son. My grief is my reality. I've chosen a picture of my son's head stone, I think that says it all.