The inevitable happened.
Tanner has been moved out of his room.
My heart.
It’s breaking.
His bed.
So empty.
Tanner’s toys and trucks and trophies and papers were left on the shelves of his bed as long as it made sense for his brother and me. Today, it was made clear to me that his brother needed to be allowed to move on with his space.
Rather than prolong the process, I just got to cleaning off the shelves.
I knew it would be hard.
It was so much harder than I expected.
I’ve somehow managed to get this far without handling Tanner’s favorite things. Travis has been the keeper of Tanner’s prized possessions thus far but today the task fell on my shoulders.
And appropriately so.
Mom-mom should be the one to tuck the toys away.
And so I went about carefully sorting the items, keeping that which I couldn’t bear to part with and finding them a place in his closet and sadly quietly parting with some of the items he wasn’t as attached to or that didn’t hold as many memories. At this point, it’s hard to justify letting anything go if his hands so much as even touched it once.
In the midst of my tears God blessed me with a very special gift: a one-inch notebook, each page filled with artwork by the hand of my precious baby that I’ve never seen. It’s probably the last of its kind I’ll ever find.
The task is done.
Every time I look in the room I’m reminded harshly that my baby is gone.
This is a hard one.
