How can you breathe again after your soul died? The kids without parents are called orphans, the wife outliving the husband is called a widow. The mother without her child is what? I’m still looking for a word to define the pain…
It feels strange to talk about my experience with death. However, I do it every time I get the chance. And I do it for me, in the first place.
The death of your child is under no circumstances an experience you can get comfortable with. The death of a child is whatever you want to call it, except a normal experience, part of life. It means to bury your soul and keep living without it.
My name is Alexa and I’m the mother of an Angel.
My story starts beautifully. Like any love story who materialises with the news of having the first baby. When two hearts are so full of love that they shape a third, tiny one.
The chaos began when this third little heart, blood of our blood, didn’t develop completely. Chaos, despair, revolt, all these feelings became part of our life abruptly and without any possibility of overpassing them. Why us? Why me?
What are we going to do now? How do we move forward? How far do we push it?
Initially, I wanted to give up on the fight that didn’t even start. That is, until I got a kick from inside. It was the moment when I realised I will do everything for the tiny creature that was growing inside me. And I did everything I could….
We decided to defy the odds and the destiny, together, hand in hand. To keep hoping, even if the chances were very small. Craziness, said the majority. Love is what we replied.
I went to a foreign country where the technology is more developed to give birth and I did, helped by a midwife who didn’t speak English. I recovered in a maternity full of happy mothers and flowers on the corridors while my newborn baby was in Intensive Care having his first fight on his own, open heart surgery after only 5 days of life on this planet.
Even though he survived this first battle, our hopes crushed 2 months later. After many weeks of loving the baby who grew inside me, under my own heart, amongst hundreds of wires, devices and IVs. After countless days of having faith and keeping the hope alive. At that point, in all honesty, I felt the hell. I felt the fire burning my soul completely and leaving only ashes where once I had a heart.
Time went by, insensitive to my excruciating pain and I stand here now to tell you that it can be done. There is life after your soul dies and you keep on living. You can get out of this black hole and learn how to love again. It is, indeed, very difficult and it takes a lot of work to do it. Conscious effort to work with yourself, your loved ones and everything you’re surrounded with, but…It can be done!
My achievement today is to still have my partner beside me, relying on each other and being able to have the family we always wanted to. And as it happens, now we have another 2 small hands reaching to us for love and guidance.
What I learned from everything that happened to my so far is that it’s not the experiences that matter, but how we react to them and what course of action we take.
If you happen to be the mother of an Angel, like me, the advice I have for you is to give you time. Give yourself time to feel, to cry, to revolt, to scream…It seems like a cliché, but it’s true. Time doesn’t ease the pain…Time doesn’t give you back the part of your body that you buried in the cold ground…But instead, time will teach you how to live with your pain, to accept it as part of your life and still be able to get out of the bed today…and tomorrow…and the day after tomorrow…and so forth…
Life will never be the same again, but it doesn’t mean it cannot be a good life from now on.
P.S. For Andrei, my baby with Angel wings
Alexa
