Yesterday

As soon as the calendar flipped over to January, I started feeling anxious. But then then the day still snuck up on me anyway. It's not over yet...tomorrow was Nate's due date. Sunday is the day that he died. Tuesday is the anniversary of his funeral. So many dates.

Yesterday was so much different than his first birthday. Tom and I spent the day together, just like we did last year, but this time we had Nate's little brother to make us laugh. I've thought so much about what I could do to honor Nate on his birthday and I finally came to the conclusion that being together as a family and loving each other like crazy is a good way to do that.

I made birthday brownie sundaes and we had pizza for dinner while watching the Democratic debate on CNN. We just spent a nice day together, but in the back of my mind all day I was trying to think of how I could have prevented the abruption. What did I do? Doctors can tell me all day long that you can neither prevent nor predict them, but I'm still going to blame myself for the rest of my life and that's just the way it is.

Two years ago...we would have still been in the hospital. The doctors would have been running tests, but I think that everyone knew what the outcome was going to be except for me. I was using the hospital breast pump because I thought that Nate would need to eat when he woke up. That's how clueless I was. I remember getting flowers delivered from a cousin with a card that read, "sorry for your loss" and I went ballistic. I guess I knew what would happen....I just didn't believe it. I still don't believe it.

I've also keeping thinking of the time I was standing in the NICU in my hospital gown, still bloated from the terrible edema with bad hair in need of highlights and Nate's neurologist looked me up and down and snidely said, "Did you have pre-natal care?" All I could do was sputter, "What?" I thought I was going to throw up. "Of course I did! This wasn't my fault!" I hated him for saying that to me and I hated even more that he was the one who would determine that Nate's little brain was completely dead and he was never, ever, ever going to wake up. Never. That paragraph doesn't even really make sense in this post...it's just a bad memory that has been going through my mind that I've never wrote about. Now maybe it won't wake me up at night.

This is hard. I mean, it's easier--it is, but it's still so damn hard.