Milestones......

So it is Easter time.....it's always been a fun holiday in our family and it's one of my husbands favorite holidaya as well. I think it will always be a little bit different for the both of us as we have both spent a great deal of this past week thinking about how different life was a year ago at Easter time.We knew at that time that there was a possibility that there was something wrong with our Gracie but still had the bit of hope to hang onto yet. Last year after I got off of work we drove to Bismarck and went to the clinic to have the life changing QUAD blood screening drawn. Dr. Witt had told us that if this test was off then we would have the option of having an amnio and then we would have our answers we had been looking for since March 15th. I think a lot of mother's tend to sense when something is wrong with their child and I was no different. I knew the test would come back badly, but no matter how much you make your brain think something your heart feels things all together differently. We went to Napoleon for Easter and as we sat in mass on Easter Sunday I looked around at all the babies....the little boys in their suits and the little girls in their beautiful Easter dresses and my heart couldn't help but make my brain think about us having a little one at Easter mass next year. I thought about how different our lives would be and how we would have to do things differently on the farm with our schedules. We on Monday at work on my lunch break I got the call from Dr. Witt that my test results were some of the lowest numbers he has ever seen on the QUAD screen and if we still wanted to do the amnio to get answers we could do it that week. I managed to hold it together for the phone call and I hung up and looked across the lunch table at my friend, Sarah and I had the total nuclear melt down at that point. Jeff was between Bismarck and McClusky and was stopping at the clinic when he got back....he had no idea what he was walking in on. We are lucky in the fact that God blessed us with Sarah as our friend and she sat us down and helped me tell Jeff some of the hardest news I have ever had to tell someone.....especially someone that I love with my entire heart and soul. We decided to do the amnio so we had some concrete results and we could start to deal with the reality of the situation. We went in that same week on Thursday and the standard protocol is to do an ultrasound to locate the placenta positioning and the babies' position and that is where the tech could plainly see our baby Gracie had anencephaly. The walls started to crumble in at that time and most days they feel like they continue to crumble in on top of us. I've been told the 6 month mark is the one of the most difficult times to go through and as the days mount to this milestone it is harder and harder to think, sleep and function. It's like this overwhelming event is creeping up on us. We talk of Gracie all the time at our house and are surrounded by photos and momentos of her, but only on occasion does my stoic husband say something to reveal how much he is truly hurting. Last night as we sat at the kitchen table out of the blue he states, "I miss Gracie and I miss holding her. I want her back so I can hold her again." Two sentences.......my heart ached for him. With so much going on at the farm now with calving and getting ready to go seeding, you tend to lose your feelings and emotions in the hustle and bustle. The Easter holiday really stirred things up at our house this past week and you can't help but relieve every single moment of how things occurred last year at this time. Sometimes I wonder how in the world we have managed to make it this far without completly losing our minds. I believe two reasons why we are managing to go on with life (so to speak) is first of all our faith in God, and second of all our true and unending love for one another. I speak highly of my husband often when I write about our loss, but nothing that I write is untrue. We are each other's best friends and each other's soul mates. I don't take that for granted as I know how fortunate I am. When either of us have a bad day with missing our daughter (me more often than him) we are always there for one another and are literally the shoulder the other cries on. There are not a lot of people that can relate to what we are each feeling and I know as we sit in mass on Easter Sunday we will both be thinking about the same thing as we see all of the young couples with their babies in church. We will both be feeling the same ache in our hearts and that feeling of emptiness. This past week a Bismarck magazine publication called Inspired Woman came out with a new issue. On the front cover is my sister in law, Cheryl and I......Cheryl wrote into the magazine when they had a contest on who inspires you. Cheryl wrote about Gracie and I and won first place. Gracie's story is not touching many, many, many more lives which is exactly what God's plan was for her. Here is the link in case you haven't read it yet: http://www.inspiredwomanonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/IW-April_2012.pdf   My head knows why things happened with Gracie the way that they did, but my heart tells another story. My heart is one of a mother that longs to hold her child and see her precious face again. I see it when I close my eyes at night and it is the first thing I see when I open my eyes in the morning. Her face is in my mind as I go to work and take care of so many other people at the clinic and it is in my mind as I cook supper every evening. The image of her yawning and smiling enters my mind so often as does the image of her proud Daddy as he brought her into see me for the first time in the operating room. My mind drifts to her so many times during the day.....my brain knows she is gone, but my heart doesn't know how to deal with that realization fully. There will always be a little hole in our hearts from losing Gracie...I believe she took a piece of it with her to heaven and someday when we are together again our hearts will once again be whole.