With every beat of my heart tonight,
I wish you could experience this thing called life.
This is a thought I've had a lot since losing Sophia, a thought that hits me mostly when my grief is heavy.
My grief has evolved in these three years, and one example of this is my gratitude. Gratitude was so hard to find after losing Sophia. People would say be grateful or practice gratitude and I'd think I will never be grateful for my child's death. The thought of having to be grateful angered me.
There is no gratitude in Sophia dying and there never will be. Instead i would write that I was grateful Sophia existed. I would find other things I was grateful of.
With the thought of I wish you could experience this thing called life. I feel the same heartache I felt in the early days, as raw as ever. But as time has gone by I've learned how to cope with that pain. I cry if I need to or I tell myself it's okay to miss my little girl. And then I think to myself, this thing called life.
Sophia never got to live a life, one of the cruelest parts of babyloss is this. You're not supposed to outlive your child, it's unnatural! So we accumulate tonnes of secondary losses. Sophia dying is my primary grief, an example of my secondary grief is knowing she is missing out on experiencing even the simplest things in life.
If you asked me three years ago what I'd do when this thought comes, I'd tell you I focus on my emotions and sit with it, practicing kindness towards myself.
Now three years on when I get this thought I appreciate my life because Sophia never had the chance to experience this.
The depths of pain and hurt, a living experience. While I would once beg for the pain to just stop, I now acknowledge the pain, I embrace the depths of pain and love, I acknowledge this living experience and I do it because Sophia will never have this experience. The fact I even have a life at all, something that was taken from her. This is how I've found gratitude. Life is so precious, her life was so precious.
I now tell people that her death revealed the true magic of life to me. When I'm sad, or joyful. I take a moment to recognise that and I think of how Sophia would've only loved the chance to have these normal life experiences, to feel normal emotions in life.
Life is fragile. Life is not forever. We take the simplest things for granted. Waking up in the morning, breathing. Having emotions, thoughts, feelings. We should feel grateful for that because there are many children who never had that chance to experience it.
I am grateful to Sophia for existing, I will never be grateful that she died, but I can be grateful for the lessons my grief has brought to me.
Yesterday was Sophia's 3rd angelversary so if you can do one thing today, take a deep breath, look around you and be grateful for that moment. Be grateful for the simple fact you have a life.
If you're a loss parent reading this, I know gratitude is very hard to find. You're on your own journey, one day it might seem similar to mine, or maybe it never will be. Grief isn't meant to be the same for everyone, we all grieve differently and that's okay too. Your gratitude will come as your grief evolves, don't force it, just embrace your experience as yours.
My grief is ever evolving, but there is power in this knowledge and I thank Sophia for that. So no, I'm not grateful that my daughter died, I'm grateful that she existed, and that my grief journey has taught me so much. I will always wish she could have experienced this thing called life, but since she can't then I will appreciate the fact that I live a life.
I think this must be my third blog post on gratitude, I talk alot about it but maybe that's because I'm always balancing my grief and my gratitude.
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