I have a love/hate relationship with the mail. More often than not, my daily trip to the mailbox produces nothing more than offers to get a new credit card or switch to this or that cable company. Occasionally my mailbox produces documents that look like handwritten envelopes but turn out to be only a very generic invitation to trade in my car for a brand new car (and a hefty car payment). About two weeks ago I pulled a piece of mail from my friends at Enfamil asking whether “feeding times were fussy times” and undoubtedly providing some product of theirs that would alleviate my problem. Not my favorite trip to the mailbox, although not quite as bad as the trip to the mailbox in early January that yielded a decent sized sampling of Enfamil formula for my convenience.
Impersonal reminders of a very personal loss. I pick up these mail flyers and see pictures of blissfully happy (and surprisingly thin) new mothers holding babies that laugh in their arms. Six months ago I thought that would be me, but not with one baby, but two sweet baby boys.
Perhaps you are familiar with our story, perhaps you’ve just stumbled across this page. The long and short of it is that last spring we discovered that we were expecting twins of a very rare sort. Monoamniotic twins, meaning identical twins that develop in the same amniotic sac, are high risk babies due to the possibility of cord entanglement as the babies grow and share the same space. Our sweet boys made it to 23 weeks gestation before dancing their way into heaven.
My mailbox occasionally holds painful reminders of the life I thought I would be having, but for every baby product advertisement and parenting magazine that gets dropped in the box, I have received ten cards from friends who remind me that my loss is not mine alone. I don’t know the number of condolence cards that flooded our box after that fateful day in August, but I know that each one was sent by someone willing to shoulder even a small part of our grief. I am most touched by the friends who wrote cards expressing their sorrow over the loss of our boys, those who mentioned them by name, those who share of the tears and heartache that they felt on hearing of this loss, those who remind us of the hope that we share of the reunion we will have with our sons when this life is over. So each day I approach the box with a little trepidation – will it hold salt or salve for these wounds which mark me? But I trust that nothing in life (or in the mail) comes by chance, so each day after being alarmingly alerted by my vigilant and otherwise friendly dog of her arch-nemesis’ arrival, I check the box to see what awaits me.
And if you are one of the many who have sent cards, shared kind words, or just hugged me when there was nothing left to say, thank you.