How do you celebrate the holidays when a part of you is missing?

I have been struggling to find the answer to this question for a couple of weeks now. As anyone who knows me or has read this blog knows, November is usually one of the hardest months of the year for me, as six years ago I went through a couple of very difficult and very personal losses. But it's interesting; nothing I have gone through could ever have prepared me for the grief journey I now face.

They say grief over a child is a grief like no other. No matter how hard you try, unless you have been through that kind of loss, you can't truly understand it. Losing a child is losing a part of you, your very soul and being. It is a hell like none other I've experienced, and I am a person who is very, very familiar with pain. When you receive a terminal diagnosis for your child, what they don't tell you is that this is the kind of pain no medication can fix. It's the kind you will live with for the rest of your earthly life. I've come to understand that complete healing simply isn't in this earthly lifetime. You can't return to how things were before, because half of your heart is no longer with you. Of all of the studies done on grief, there is still so much we don't know. We can't truly understand the kind of injury death of a child leaves. From the outside you can't usually tell. Eventually I'm told, you learn to function without them. It doesn't mean you forget, and you certainly don't "get over it," you simply learn to live with the pain. Over time, it does become easier to bear. But the timeline is different for each individual, and the process of grief can not be rushed.

Millie lived just three months and ten days. Her life was so much shorter than we could ever have imagined. Even with the diagnosis of SMA, we were hopeful we might have more time. That just isn't how it went. I look at the calendar and realize that she's been gone longer than she was alive. When that realization came, it hit me like a ton of bricks. It was a wave of searing and unrelenting pain all over again. But she lived. She mattered. In her short three months of life she changed her dad and I forever. We now realize that every moment must be cherished, that the things you think matter so much when you're expecting a child simply don't matter as much as you first thought. Her tiny footprints left a mark on every person she touched. People all over the country, and even in some foreign countries were heartbroken at our loss.

In her lifetime we celebrated just one holiday together: the 4th of July. OK, so Memorial Day was in there somewhere too, but we really don't count that. We didn't dress her in her outfit because she didn't fit into it. We didn't go to fireworks because she had an appointment over an hour away the next morning. Her aunt Kelsey and uncle Austin came to be with us, and we went to one of our favorite restaurants together, with Millie in tow. Maybe it wasn't what most people would consider a celebration. We saw every day that our daughter was alive as a victory. Knowing her time was limited made every day count that much more. She met her uncle for the first time that day, as Austin was not able to be with us before that. Looking back, it was clear she was getting very close to leaving us. She died just 11 days later. But we didn't focus on how poorly she was doing. We focused on the fact that we had family there to love on her and love on us. Ironically I think Millie's life was actually a very peaceful, blissful time. Sure there were a lot of scary moments, but we didn't focus on them. Our daughter was such an amazing gift and we knew that we just had to soak her in every moment we could.

Now Thanksgiving is just days away. It's hard sometimes to be thankful for much. Though we know we are blessed beyond measure we are missing a huge part of our family. Now she would be nearly eight months old. This was supposed to be her first Thanksgiving. Sure, we may not have been able to travel as much, people may have had to come to us or we would have just stayed home. But you know what? I'd rather have it that way. We have more freedom now than we did then, and I truthfully don't know how to process it. When you become a parent many times you realize that life isn't going to be the same anymore. You make sacrifices and are more tied down, but it is worth it. I'm struggling to find the balance. I know that Millie wants us to find moments of happiness again, to rebuild ourselves around our loss. Sometimes after you've lost your child you feel guilty for your moments of joy. At the time where the loss is fresh, it feels like you may never be happy again. Thankfully, that just isn't the case. You learn to find joy in the midst of overwhelming sadness.

While I don't know what is going to happen this Thanksgiving, I do know this: I am thankful for my daughter. There will never be a moment in time where I will say she wasn't worth every second of pain and heartache I have felt or will feel. She was the most amazing and beautiful person I have ever known. I hang on to every memory, every photo, every video. You don't realize until reality hits you how much all of those things truly do matter. When photos and memories are all  you have left, they become so important.