We’re over halfway through the first month of the New Year. I finally took down the Christmas tree and other decorations this week. I’m thinking about projects I need to get done around the house and updating pictures of the kids with some of the cute ones I snapped over the holidays. When thinking about this I realized something: the last picture I have with our whole family in it is one we took on Easter when I was still pregnant with Ruby.
One of my biggest regrets is not getting a picture of us all together when the kids came to the hospital to meet their sister after she came silently into the world. In the haze of shock and grief I didn't think to ask anyone to snap one for us. Every family picture from here on out she will be missing.
I know there are lots of sweet ways to try to include her in family photos to come. I know other families include their baby by putting their special bear or a framed picture in family photos and maybe we’ll do something similar in the future. She’s part of our family and we will always want to include her if we can.
In this moment, I'm still struggling with the empty place she should fill. I’m experiencing the painful truth that nothing will erase her absence. I wanted to watch Ruby grow up, I wanted to know her in the way I know each of my other children. When her heart stopped beating that future died with her. I’m learning how to parent a child who is not here. There is no rolling over for the first time, no first steps, no first words, no learning to read, no leaving home, no getting married, no having a family of her own, and no other hundreds of things I would have loved to do with her. There are instead all these horrible firsts. First Thanksgiving without her, first Christmas without her, waking up in a year in which she never lived. If I think about it for too long it feels too much to bear.
So for now, I won’t update family pictures on our wall any further than Easter 2017. I will collage her picture next to updated pictures of her brothers and sister. I’ll keep my home and lock screen on my phone as they are with Ruby on one and that last family picture with everyone in it on the other.
