The appointed time
/Today’s guest post is from Sara, a teacher, designer, wife, mother of a hyperactive two-year-old and an angel baby.
It's still surreal. She should be two months old now, but we'll be celebrating her 40th day of death in two days.
I look back and wonder how I was able to carry her to term. A diagnosis of complex congenital heart disease at 25 weeks in utero, and I went from wishing for a miscarriage to cherishing the remaining weeks of my pregnancy. What do they mean by "she won't be able to live her life"?
She did. Maybe we just need a broader understanding of what "life" means.
Sometimes I wonder if I made the right decision to roll the dice. Maybe, the appointed time is in 20, 30, or 60 years. The surgeon tells me, "there is one fatality out of every ten surgeries." The pediatric cardiologist tells me, "the risks outweigh the benefits." While my thoughts played tug-of-war between accepting what's natural versus science lending us a hand, I constantly wished I could take her place and they could cut me open instead.
I feel like science has failed me. The numbers fooled me. But, we had to try. We had to find out when the appointed time was. It was an arduous journey of hospital visits, bad updates, and hearing nurses say, "I'm sorry."
She went in less than fifteen minutes, after we said our good byes. She waited for us. I guess she knew when.
We now live a life where the feeling of joy comes with a little bit of sadness.
How do you think about time in relation to loss? How has loss affected your sense of time?