Happy Birthday, or is it?

And so the week I have such a love/hate relationship with has commenced once again.

It is the week that 9 years ago, our 8th son was born, but also died.

It is the week, that nine years on is still etched in my mind, every second of every day of my son's life.

For that I am both glad and sad.

Everyone who has lost a baby, knows the anticipation of the week is often far worse than the days.

I think after nine years, we are so very busy I don't have the anticipation anymore, but it tends to hit me like a brick the night before his birthday and the feelings linger on until after he was cremated.

When your baby dies, that is not it, there is no closure. You live on in a world where they should have been.

Every family photo, is not a complete representation of your family, because your child is missing, every family event caries with it a twinge of sadness because there is someone not present there to make it complete. I felt this acutely in June at Abie's wedding where my other son's were ushers, Joshua should have been standing there as well.

My brain is often in battle.The fight is to eradicate the 'should have, could have, would haves', and replace them with less negative terminology. Sometimes it works, and sometimes I fall into the patterns again, often at times where I feel he needed to be there, the celebrations and events times.

So how do you celebrate a birthday without the birthday boy? It is a hard one.

We celebrate because we want to remember him and the little life he had, because he will always be a part of our family, no matter what anyone else says, and because it is one of the very few little gestures we can still do for him.

Is it happy?

Not really.

But it is meaningful and the little ones love it each year.

How do you explain to a 6 year old where her brother is, what he was like and why he died? 

I fight against the feelings that no 6 year old should really have to have this conversation vs feelings that she needs to know she had a brother that everyone else can remember.

 Caleb looks very like Joshua. I am grateful for this. I can, in some small way see perhaps a little of the boy he would have grown into. Caleb is not Joshua, he is himself, an adorable, much loved little boy who shares, as his middle name , his big brothers.

And so each year we buy balloons, from the same shop, they have long since stopped asking why we buy so many once a year. We go to the beach and we release them, we light the same scented candles around the house that we had when we brought Joshua home with us for a few days before his final goodbyes and we have a birthday cake. We but new decorations for his stone and garden and make him cards and little gifts.

This is how we cope with loosing our baby.

It is not the way others cope, but everyone is entitled to do it their way.

The grief process has no wrongs nor rights, and no one has the authority to dictate what we should or should not do, especially those who have (fortunately) not walked our path.

Some one once said we belong to a club, the only club no one wants to join. The dead baby club.

Membership is automatic, unavoidable, sudden, shocking, painful, all consuming, and harsh. That only goes a little to describing it. Open heart surgery without the anaesthetic perhaps goes a small way to describing the absolute physical pain you feel.

So you see, this birthday brings with it the whole spectrum of feelings once again. You want to remember yet you don't want all those emotions brought back.

A birthday, thankfully unlike all the others.

Happy Birthday sweetheart!