I lost my memories.
My baby died. It’s the worst of all imaginable pains.
It’s not possible to quantify the size of the wounded heart of a mom who loses her child… but I can tell you how it can get worse: realize you’ve lost the first five years of his baby pictures.
My memory is terrible. Yes, I can picture every inch of him as if he were sitting by me and I was staring right at him. I know his expression just by what mine would be.
One of my favorite things was just to watch him without saying a word. He would inevitably catch me and say “Whaaaaat?!” This would be followed by a few grand gestures before he would look away and just say “goof” with a laugh under his breath. I spent a lot of time just watching him. There was something about everything he did that made my heart happy. He thought it was hilarious I found him so entrancing; his smile is still my most favorite place to be.
But there are 13 years of memories I can’t just pull out of my cluttered brain. It’s why I took so many photos and videos, I knew my memory would fail me and I wanted to have the photos to look back on and smile over.
It never occurred to me that someday they would be all I had.
Of course I was smart. My precious photos were backed up: one file on my lap top, one on an external hard drive. Well, smart until my laptop failed me and then my external hard drive stopped working.
I began to panic. God couldn’t take away my baby AND my most precious memories of him. His first steps, first meeting, first haircut, first of everything… it was salt in a cavernous wound.
On the one-week anniversary of Tanner going into the ER, I began frantically searching my boxes for the pictures of our first meeting and his first steps. For whatever reason, I needed to be able to hold onto our first day together while I prepared to face the anniversary of our last day together. Not rational…. just me. The hard copies were no where to be found and I knew my digital images were lost. I spent the better part of an hour in the garage sobbing over my photo bin until I was too weak to stand.
It took me another two weeks to ask for help. I was too scared of more bad news. Too frightened to hear the photos could not be retrieved and were gone. I was terrified of losing my baby all over again.
It cost $1,900 in lab fees (a huge discount!) but I just got them back. Thank God. I don’t think I realized how much weight the loss of these photos was adding to my grief. Once again I found myself sobbing over photos, but this time it was pure relief as I clutched the new drive holding five precious years of my baby’s life.
I have his very first steps back… steps he was taking toward me when I knelt down to take his photo. I would pay $1,900 for any ONE of these photos.
It’s been quite a few years since I looked at these photos closely. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how God brought us together and matched us. Tanner knew from the first moment that I was his mom. I look now at the photo where he is staring right at me with the biggest grin on his face and I can finally see what everyone else all saw…
Love.
