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Wednesday, July 7, 2010

A Trip to the Beach

I graduated from college in 2000.  I am still in very close touch with 5 good friends from college, and all live within 3 hours of me.  One lives in SW Connecticut, two are married to each other and live in Queens, one lives in North Jersey and the other moved back to upstate NY a little over a year ago.  Out of all of us, there are 4 children ranging in age from 3 years to 2 weeks.  Plus Gracie.

While I was out with the dogs tonight, I was thinking about how much fun it would be for all of us to plan a trip to the beach next summer with all of the little ones (we have to plan months in advance to get us all together at the same time).  And then it hit me...like a ton of bricks...that we had started talking about the same thing a year ago for this summer. Gracie would have been the youngest at somewhere between 9 and 11 months.  That was before our friends got pregnant with the baby that was just born...that was before Gracie died...that was before everything changed.

My closest friend in the group had a baby about 4 months before Gracie was due.  I have watched all of her photo and video updates over the last year, so happy to see her daughter hitting her milestones, yet fully aware of everything that I was (and am) missing with Gracie...and constantly wondering... WTF???  WHY ME?  WHY US?  WHY MY FAMILY?  Now that the thought about beach planning has resurfaced, it is just one more thing that I can add to the list of things that I will never do with Gracie.  Sometimes I almost wish thoughts like this simply would not resurface...



4 comments:

Antoinette said...

i say this all the time...the 'WHAT I CANT DO' hurts so bad....everything i feel surrounds me with what i cant do etc...i can totally see why the beach was a trigger for you....so sorry....wish that you didnt have to think the 'why me' at all :(

Dawn Brown said...

Last year, we planned our February anniversary trip around having a 5 month old. When our anniversary came...it was hard, all I could think about was how I had grumbled about never having another romantic weekend with my husband. It was awful.
It struck me this summer that we are again planning an anniversary with a little one.
It's hard, but I don't think we'll ever fully escape these reminders of where we were and what we lost. **HUGS**

Anonymous said...

Last night I laid in bed unable to sleep because I was thinking about the beach and what it would have been like with Valentina there. Which got me to thinking about her little clothes and her little headbands... and what she was buried in. :( Some days, I feel like everything is a trigger.

Maggie said...

I hate moments like this. I have 3 friends on FB who either had their babies right before me or right after, so I'm constantly seeing 6-7 mth. old pictures posted up and it always reminds me of what I'm missing out on. ((((HUGS))))