Brothers

In just a few weeks, you will be a big brother again…on the heavenly side of life.  Your newest sibling will be a boy, too, like you.  I was buying shirts for he and your sister and had a sudden longing to add the “Big Brother” size 3T shirt to my shopping cart.  I wanted to buy it so much, even if it were just to bring it to your gravesite and lay it there.  I didn’t.  Because I can use that money for something else.  But the urge was there, strong and true.  I wonder if that urge is stronger this time because this little one is a boy and makes me think of you in a more specific way.  Or perhaps because this time my pregnancy has been a bit less full of minute-by-minute anxiety, which is how I spent my pregnancy with your sister.  I still have those moments.  Particularly when I think of looking at this new little persons face and seeing you in him.  I loved that about your sister’s birth…finding the similarities between the two of you made me smile while I cried.  I worry more this time that I will unfairly compare you because he is living and you have died and you are the same gender.  Which isn’t fair to either one of you.  I don’t want that weight.  But I worry it will be there and I won’t be able to stop it.  Which I suppose is part of the process of remembering…remembering that so much of the miracle of life and death is outside of our control.  I have not allowed myself much room this time to think about it.  I’ve been too busy trying to coral a 2 year old and work and breathe.  But it sits there, in the dimness of nights when I can’t sleep, which happens more and more often these days.  I’m not sure what to do with it.  I do know that hearing your brother’s heartbeat in the twice weekly appointments I must now go to should be comforting.  But then I remember that I heard yours just as strongly and you didn’t get to stay.  I heard you cry and then you stopped.  I felt your breath against my chest and then I didn’t.  For reasons I cannot understand, like much of my experience with the cycle of life these last four years, I find myself clinging to those memories as if to prepare myself for battle.  I’m excited to meet your brother.  But I fear it at the same time because once it starts, he’ll be born and could die.  Which I know we all could.  At any time.  Logically I know this.  The mind games of pregnancy after loss that I found myself trapped in with your sister have been replaced by those of birth after loss and the grief of looking into a little boys face and seeing not him but his older brother.  Which is a perfectly imperfect way of looking at new life.  We all compare our children.  It’s human nature.  I hope to see you in a few weeks.  But I also hope, for all our sakes, that I can see past you and meet your little brother.  Any help, from your end, is appreciated buddy.  Love, Mom