18 Months...

Each month the 26th, is a little different.  For the last 18 months I have never missed this date or let it pass me by. I either count down the days leading up to this with a heavy heart. Some months I get so caught up in life that I forget to look at the calendar until the day itself and it catches me off guard, a huge knife stabs me in the heart as soon as I realise exactly what day it is. Today was one of those days. These ordinary two numbers, the 2 and the 6 are forever etched into my mind. Seeing them anywhere, in any context makes my heart skip a beat. I know they are only numbers, yet to me they represent her. On this date each month, everything turns more raw, memories more vivid and painful. The 26th symbolises the beauty of her birth now entwined with heartache that she is no longer here.

18 months ago today. I held her for the first time. I caressed her soft baby skin, inhaled her sweet baby smell, kissed her rosy warm little cheeks. I was the happiest I could ever be. I was the happiest I will ever be. Instead of a happy anniversary, this date has turned into a  marker of time passing my daughter by. Life continues on around me. I continue life. I am so still and quiet with my pain these days. Privacy somehow feels right. I want to be alone with the pain, I don't want to share it. It wasn't always this way but these days it is. I have learned there is no right or wrong way and we have to do whatever feels right for us. Well, quiet and private seems to suit me the best right now. No one knows. I don't bring up my pain to those around me. Not to family or even husband who know very well what this day represents. Others pain and sadness are at times too much for me to take. All I can deal with is my own and I don't know how to be there for them.

So I just sit with my pain, quietly for hours. I am quiet on the outside yet I am screaming inside. There is a silent scream inside of me, it's shrill piercing cry slicing though my mind, my body....screaming for my daughter. Longing, missing, crying out for my 18 month old little girl who should be right here with me now. Yet I sit alone in a room, my heart forever broken, my arms still empty, still aching just as they have been the last 17 months....