Letters to Owen

On a whim, I bought this yellow journal a few days before Owen was born and once he arrived I quickly began filling the pages with pumping schedules, questions for doctors...and letters. Writing to Owen helped me feel close to him when we were separated in the early days. It helped me process my feelings about his birth and his mysterious heart defects that I had just learned about. It helped me apologize to him.

I continued to write letters to Owen in DC, sometimes from my hotel room and sometimes from room 377. As he endured day after day of procedures, tests, steps forward and back I wrote to him about it. I shared with him all his progress he made and the milestones he hit. I told him about the kind people caring for him. I told him about my fear that I might lose him before I told anyone else. I apologized to him more. It became a way to mother him when I couldn't do the normal things. I fully intended to read the letters to him one day.

Now that he is my Heaven Baby, I still write to him. I tell him how much I love him. I tell him how much I miss him and how much I wanted him before he even existed. I tell him about the kind people caring for me now. I tell them how they don't know what to say and neither do I. I tell him about his Daddy and how sad I am that he won't get to laugh at his silly jokes and play with him. I tell him about his brothers and his cousins and how many things they all wanted to do with him. I tell him about the thousands of people that prayed for him, even the ones that didn't know him. I tell him about the family that came to the hospital and held him and said goodbye and about how hard it was to walk away from him that night. I tell him about Nurse Nora taking him to Disney to run a marathon and about Elliott taking Löwen ice skating.

I tell him about the lions I see everywhere. I tell him about the ocean and about finding a dress to wear to his funeral...and then hating it and finding a second one. I tell him how sad I am but ask him not to worry about me. Sometimes I ask him for help. I ask him to talk to me and send me signs from Heaven and I come back to those pages and thank him when he does. I ask him what it's like in Heaven and if he is happy. I tell him how proud I am of him. My brain knows these are words he will never read but my heart needs to get them out. It's become sort of a lifeline, much like this blog, to write to him. It keeps him alive to me.

My grief demands a lot of my attention these days. I am trying to accept it and integrate it into my life. It hurts a lot but I try to sit with it, feel it, and try to let it be. I try to let my husband hold me as I ugly cry. I try to take deep breaths. That's what the books say to do. And they also say to write if it feels good to do so. So I keep writing to Owen, and I keep allowing these stories to flow as freely as my tears. Again, it's not healing, but it's helping with the integration.

Many, many people have said they can't explain it but they feel connected to Owen, changed by him, somehow different having known him, or known of him. If you are one of these people, I hope you always feel this way. I hope you also don't try to analyze it and explain it away but rather let that feeling inhabit you, let him breathe something new into you that perhaps wasn't there before. If somehow he can bring you closer to someone you have lost or someone still living that you haven't spoken to in a while, I hope you'll embrace that--maybe even have the courage to act on it. Maybe you never had a child and you feel connected to Owen and writing to him feels good. If Owen can do these things for you, please let him.

Now, please understand that I would trade all that connection, all those ways he's moved you (and I would do it without your permission and on your behalf), if I could have my sweet baby boy back. But in the unbearable loss of my baby, if there is meaning being cultivated in someone else's life, I am glad for that. And I am prayerful that one day such meaning will begin to be cultivated again in my own.

If you want to share what Owen meant to you or how he changed you I would love if you would also write to him. But really write, don't email. Don't text. Get out that stationary, that journal, a blank page in the back of your kid's math notebook...start with "Dear Owen" and then just write. And then stick a stamp on it like we used to, and send it to us. We would love to read your words and we think that maybe they'll help us on our journey through this thick fog of grief towards healing. At the very least it will put more loving energy into the universe, and God knows our world needs so, so much. If you don't have our address, send us a message and we will give it to you.