The girls have their memory books out in their craft area and have gotten them out a few times lately to add pages and make up new adventures for them to have with Oliver in heaven.
This year for his birthday they wanted to bake cookies with Nana (who visited last week) and a family we've become close friends with. They came over for dinner, looked at our picture books of Oliver, and loved us through the evening.
His tree survived the cross-country journey in the moving van and bloomed right on time again.
I've mostly held myself together this month, but now that I am putting this post together, sorrow is suddenly welling up into tears. These memories are so precious to me, but while I cherish them I simultaneously fear them and the grief they stir up in me; a fear I'm learning to overcome, because I want to remember and I want to grieve well. I suppose that with any child, part of parenting is dealing with the pain of heartache at one point or another over your child for any number of reasons. So one way I can be mama to Oliver (because I will never stop being his mama) is to hold his memory firmly in that balance of grief and hope and not diminish it out of my own fear of emotion or of what anyone might think.
Maybe that's why I decided tonight to start getting the last few months of pictures ready to post - it was really just time to unzip those thoughts that I have been avoiding and keeping neatly tucked away. But grieving isn't neat, no matter much I'd like to have a tidy description of "how to grieve" and "how long it will take." Hope can feel rather messy too, especially when false hopes get shaved away. As messy as it feels, my grief comes from the pain of a world in desperate need of redemption, and thus points directly to my hope of that redemption.
Happy Birthday my little boy.
