Just a cloud away

Oh, little boy,

I miss you so much. Your song came on the other day. It caught me off guard and I cried and cried. Sometimes I still can't wrap my mind around the fact that you are gone. When I think about you it feels surreal because you've been gone for so much longer than you were here.  
When you really know and love someone there's usually what seems to be endless tales of love and laughter and memories with them, but when I talk about you I get this grueling pain in my chest because Ive been telling the same stories for exactly 15 months, 1 week, and 2 days. There comes a point in my conversations about you where my stories come to an abrupt stop, just  like your life did. I know you more in death than I did in life.

Lately I talk more about my belief that you're surrounded by love in your Grandma Jeans arms. It seems odd to say but I feel closer to her now than I did before she joined you. She has always been a wonderful grandma but her illness made it hard for me to visit her. Seeing her made me sad and I never knew what to say because Parkinson's disease robbed her of being the grandma I adored as a child. 

She passed just two days before what would have been your 1st birthday. We knew she did not have much time left, but I could not bring myself to go see her because the thought of watching life escape from another person I loved was just too painful. 

It ate away at me the whole week, so I wrote her a letter for your grandpa to read to her. She died an hour later. In that letter I pleaded she please make sure you know how much I love you. The second my dad told me she was gone I knew that was actually what she went to do...
 I'm so proud to call her my grandma and so lucky that she is with you giving you all the love I so badly wish I could. 

Whenever the sky looks insanely beautiful, I know it's the both of you. 

I love you, Boston. Always. 

Not for the faint of heart

Life is.... So much different than I thought it would be. I don't remember taking any classes in school that taught me how much it hurts when your heart breaks, that babies die, or that even when you're trying to do right things still can and do go absolutely wrong. I don't remember a class that taught me what to do in times of crisis and tragedy, or a class that gave insight on what to do when you feel like giving up. 
Sometimes I find myself feeling bitter about this, among a long list of other things. Like maybe, just maybe, if someone would have taught me, or at least warned me, I wouldn't be making my way through life as a bereaved and broken hearted mother. Maybe this wouldn't be my story.  
The part of me that lives in reality, the part of me that watches and learns and figures things out on my own knows that's not true, but it is hard not to be bitter. It is hard to calm the fire in my heart that just wants to scream that it's so unfair that there's no do overs in life. 
Since finding out I am expecting again I've been thinking a lot about that. This baby is not a do over. This baby will not, and could not, ever replace Boston. However, it would be a lie to say the mind doesn't wander to strange places...
At my first ultrasound I was so eager to see this little new life, but I kept finding my mind going to some twisted fairy tale like place and wanting it to be Boston. I want to do Boston all over again. 
I want to go back to that place where my love for my children was still innocent and blindly hopeful.. When my heart didn't always hurt and ignorance was still bliss. I want to go back to the time when I didn't know that babies die or how hard it is to focus on the good in things after figuring out that they do...that babies can die. My baby did. 
It is hard not to think of that while once again preparing to love another child. What if I go to my next doctor appointment and something is wrong? To think of ever having to feel the awful sick to my stomach, raging, relentless pain that I felt when a nurse turned to tell me the worst on the day that Boston died has me scared out of my mind. I don't want to be scared, but I am. 
Fear follows me every where I go and I'm realizing that I'm once again learning something no one ever taught me... How to not let fear rob me of my joy.

My darling little fatboy,
I wonder if you see how much I cry these days. Some of them tears of joy, some of them tears of pain. Even though I cannot see you, please be here with me. I still need you. 
All my love,
Mommy