Guest Post by Maripili Araya
The names we picked out thinking we would get to say them out loud all day, every day.
The names that grew in our hearts, engraved.
The ones that tasted like candy in our mouths…
It took my husband and I forever to pick out our twins names. Noah we were sure of from the very beginning, but Gael…we had a million other names in mind before we got to Gael and each one we somehow disagreed on. It doesn’t sound well with Noah, its too long, too short, it sounds awful with the last name Castillo. And then our friends suggested Gael and we both looked at each other and something clicked. It was the ying to the yang, the perfect combination to our Noah.
We had found the perfect match. The names rolled off our tongues like honey, we were in love with both.
So ready to call them out loud, to write them down, to see them written everywhere.
My husband is a big child (which man isn’t right? 😉 I could picture the twins playing of being superheroes and saving the world with him…
And then they died. When I was seven months pregnant our children died, leaving those empty holes in our hearts with the shapes of them, never to be filled with any one else. And the names stopped rolling off our tongues like sweets. As filled with love as they were before, now they were like stabs to our hearts filled with confusion, anger and emptiness. They were reminders of what was gone, what would never be.
They became unspoken for some time, the most dreadful, painful time in our lives.
Family reunions, no one mentioned them.
Friends got together and no one mentioned their beautiful names.
The ones we thought would always be present. Forever.
It hurt. Not hearing their names out loud when our hearts were screaming them all day.
It made me dread everyone that pretended like they weren’t here. To be quite honest at times the silence angered me like nothing else.
A year has passed now since we said goodbye and their names are being spoken more now. Such sweet reminders that they were here.
The promise of hope now a promise of love, of always…
We lost our boys because of a horrible illness called Twin to Twin Transfusion Syndrome. The best treatment there is for it is laser surgery and when they were sick there was no laser machine in our country, they could not get the treatment. When they died my Dr and I vowed we would fight to get a machine so that other babies would have a better chance of fighting this disease. A year later we finally got one, and the first laser ablation surgery for twin to twin transfusion syndrome in central america was done on february 21st 2013. It was on tv, in the radio, in the newspaper. My boys names were there, being remembered. The sweetness of their essence, their memory, some sort of unwanted purpose.
I always thought I was naming boys that would play of being superheroes. Never imagined that I was naming boys whose memory would help save another baby’s life.
A different kind of superhero…
What does your baby’s name mean to you? Who speaks it to you often?
What do you do when you miss hearing it?
{Your Thoughts}