Strength: Where does it come from? Everyone always wants to tell me how strong I am for how I am today with dealing with the death of Mari. And I used to think the same thing when I saw a parent and how they were dealing with the death of a child. I would think to myself how incredibly strong that person must be to be dealing with the loss. The strength they have inside themselves must be so incredibly strong to be able to get through this incredibly hard time. I know I could never be that strong. I could never make it through the loss of a child.

AND THEN IT HAPPENS TO YOU!

I can honestly say I hate it when I hear how strong someone thinks I am. I have learned that it is not strength. I know some people will be in disagreement with me. However, only another parent who has lost a child will truly understand what I am about to say. It is not strength that gets you through. It is that you don’t have a choice. I mean, my child’s life has ended but I am still alive on this earth. I can either somehow learn to live my life without my child here or I kill myself. For most people, the latter is really not an option. For some reason our child’s life ended before ours. The order seems to be out of whack. Yet, we are still here as the parent and our child has passed away. So we learn to live a new life without them here. No, we may never truly understand why our child is gone but they are none the less. So it is not strength that gets us through but that we have no choice. We have to continue on with our lives. It is like we have died and a new person was reborn in our place.

It is a choice. I know there are some parents out there who felt that once their child died they had nothing to live for so they take their lives. I can honestly say that there were days where I wish God would just take my life early as I did not see how I could live without Mari here but I never wanted to take my own life. It did feel unbearable at times with the pain and grief going so incredibly deep. There were so many at first. Now they have become fewer and fewer being farther and farther apart. My life seems to have happiness in it again. I believe this is a good thing. It is hard to live life if you are always feeling sad and down.

I love you baby girl and mommy misses you very much.

Love Mommy