The last safe place...

I remember the last hours before John Preston was born.  We checked into the hospital at about 9:00pm.  My sister, who in another post you will find out essentially raised me, drove up from Nashville and arrived at 11:30pm.  From the time that she got there until John Preston was born I was in what I think was a "sadly hopeful cocoon".  Until he was born and they took him away, it wasn't real that he was gone, they could be wrong, I was still going to give birth, I was a mommy and I was wholly and completely being taken care of by my knight, my sister-mom and nurses.  I was on morphine and drifting in and out of sleep and having still peaceful dreams.  My aunt and uncle came by to visit.

As horrible as the truth was, those last few hours still felt safe.  Nothing has ever felt safe since then.  I worry about Jimmy Ray dying, about my sister dying, about my daddy dying.  I worry about dying and leaving Jimmy Ray and my sister to cope with that.  I am constantly on alert about where I am going and who is going to be there and what the 'babyland' level will be.  I am afraid to go anywhere without Kleenex.  I am afraid that my house will burn down and I will lose the only physical things I have that connect me to John Preston (his hand and foot mold, his Christmas ornament provided by the funeral home, my computer with the pictures of me pregnant, of his sunlit gravesite, etc.).  I am afraid that people will forget about him, that people will ask about and him, that people won't ask about him, that someday I might possibly not think of him every minute or hour or day.  I am afraid that one day Jimmy Ray and I will be 2 old folks without anyone to take care of, or visit, or notice us.  And then that one of us will be left all alone without even each other. 

And then I hear a song like "I Can Only Imagine" (Mercy Me) or "Unclouded Day" (favorite: Broken Bridges soundtrack version) and something inside me calms down. And I can function and I can breath and I can live.

One of the options that the doctor gave us 2 days before his birth was that the hospital could take care of 'it' (his body!) for us.  We didn't know what to do about anything at that point and originally said okay to that.  How horrific.  Sometime during the night Jimmy Ray held my hand and said "I don't want to throw away my son".

I will never feel totally safe again - and maybe we shouldn't on this earth.  In those last few hours, when there was hope and a dream, I was cocooned in that last safe place.