Three Years of Remembering and Unexpected Surprises

Zachary’s third birthday, also the day of his death, fell over the Canadian Thanksgiving weekend this year. This was timely as I have much to be thankful for regarding Zach.

I am thankful for thirty weeks of kicks and the magic bond between mother and child.

I am thankful for his life, however brief.

I am thankful I held him alive for just a few moments.

I am thankful for the strength he seemed to give me to survive.

I am thankful that he has given me a passion to help others.

I am thankful that I still feel him with me.

 

It has taken me a month to write this post, not out of busyness, but because of what shocked me on the day we celebrated and remembered…

We began Zachary’s birthday as we always do, with a plentiful breakfast and time as a family. My husband Aaron, daughter Hannah, son Eden and I went for a walk through the autumn foliage. At home we baked a cake and lit Zachary’s candle – the candle I lit for the first time on his original due date and have lit on the anniversary of his death every year since. This was year number three. It’s hard to believe my son would have been three years old – that breaks my heart.

At the end of the day, Aaron and I continued a tradition of spending time together and looking at the scrapbooks I made of Zachary’s birth and the one sole photo album we have of him. This was when the first surprise came. I surprised myself actually. The emotion that flared out of me? Anger amidst a torrent of tears.

I feel like I am writing the same blog post as I did for Zachary’s second birthday, and his first as well. The anger that rose up in my chest at the close of all those days has been the same from year to year. This surprised me.

Somehow I thought that time would continue to lessen my emotion, would numb parts of my experience, which it has in some ways – yet the ager remained. I am not an angry person or feel this emotion daily. The daily anger at my loss left me two years ago if I recall correctly.

This anger at the injustice of my son’s death, at my helplessness to change the past and bring Zachary back will likely never fully leave me I realize. But who knows. All that is certain is that my love for my son continues to grips me deeply and its force surprises me still.

Truly the heat of love burns but I am thankful for its warmth of remembrance. 

One thing I would like to note: We did something new this year. The four of us in our little family wrote Zachary a letter or made him a drawing. We sealed them in envelopes and added stamps. We mailed them to ourselves. When the letters arrived a few days later, stamped and dated, this too was a surprise as if I forgot they were coming. It was a nice surprise.

I put the unopened letters in Zachary’s memory box where they will await us until next year when we open them and write new letters. I think it will be a special way for us to see how we grow as a family. This letter project creates a legacy of new memories. It will also give me something to scrapbook in a few years.