It was love that brought a man and a woman together, cells colliding, fusing and making something (someone) new. You. It was no mere accident of biology or evolution, and it was more than the sum of hormones and chemical reactions.
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| January 25, 2010 |
In the beginning, there was love.
For a period of weeks, someone new existed and was growing, invisible to everyone but God. We hoped and prayed like we had hoped and prayed in the months before, but we did not yet know. But we loved you before your time began. We loved you before you were created. Love came before you, and love was at your beginning. There was never a moment when you were not loved.
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| April 21, 2010 |
Love was with you as you grew inside, as you rolled and punched and kicked and squirmed, testing your limits and outgrowing your boundaries.
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| August 24, 2010 |
Love was with you at your birth, love of you more than the pain and the fluid and the blood. And then you came. We saw your face, touched your skin for the first time. I looked into your eyes and heard your voice. And oh ... the love.
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| September 18, 2010 |
Love was with you when they took you from me, when they measured you, when they put you down in an isolette and stuck an oxygen canula in your nostrils. Love was with you when they drove you away, when voices and hands you didn't know clamored over you, taking blood and scanning things. You must have been afraid, and so were we. But before the fear, there was love.
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| September 18, 2010 |
Love held you at every moment, even when we were too far away to see or touch you.
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| September 22, 2010 |
Love sent you off for procedures and surgeries and prayed to see you alive again, look in your wakeful eyes again. Love waited and hoped and prayed and wept in the hours when most of the world around us was asleep. Love touched you when you had needles and tubes in your skin, and open wounds and medications running through your veins. Love sang to you in the dark of the night, over the hum of machines.
Love was there when it was all too much to bear.
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| September 26, 2010 |
Love set the cross upon you. Love anointed you. Loved waited. Love prayed.
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| September 30, 2010 |
Love could see when you had had more than even such a strong and fierce little body and spirit could take. And so on the night we hoped would never come, love sang to you, kissed you, held you.
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| October 3, 2010 |
And then love let you go.
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| October 9, 2010 |
I can no longer feel your skin or look into the eyes that cut to a place so deep in my soul, I didn't know it existed. I can sing to you, but not in the same way. The baby boy that grew under my heart is gone. Instead, I hold pictures of you, the soft little monkey you held, or the blankets that touched your skin. I touch them and try to remember how it felt: your skin, your weight. I try to remember the sound of your cry, the smell of your breath, the way you would move your mouth as you drifted off to sleep. These things are never enough.
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| December 23, 2010 |
But love persists. Love remains. Love is still here, and I hope you can see it, feel it, and receive it in the place where you are now. Every tear shed in silent stillness, every secret smile, every ache in my heart has your name attached. No matter what happens, love is still here. You still have a place with me -- a place no one else can occupy. It is yours. It was yours at the beginning and so it remains.
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| August 19, 2011 |
In the beginning, there was love. And so it goes, and so it goes, love without end.
For Ewan, and for all the little ones who were gone too soon.
