Post by Stephanie Dyer
We sat on the couch after almost two weeks of being just slightly east of ‘civil’ to one another.
It was time to have a reckoning of one issue we didn’t seem to agree upon…
grieving.
Of course, he grieved each of our daughters in his way, but ultimately, he realized that he and I were in different places.
He stated that he would never feel the way I did because he didn’t carry either of our children.
He didn’t feel them move or experience birth.
He would never truly understand my pain.
He realized that it had forever changed me and wished that there was a way to connect again.
So, I pulled out the lawn chairs and said, “Stand here with me and imagine every occasion and event that we will celebrate in our living children’s lives.
Picture birthday parties, cookouts, soccer games, Christmas dinners, graduations, weddings…
and now look at these two empty chairs.
There will always be two empty chairs where our daughters should be.”
And he finally understood.
Diana is owner and editor-in-chief of Still Standing Magazine and blogs her own life story at Diana Wrote. She and her military retired husband have two girls and three sons who passed away after birth; Preston and Julian, identical twin boys who were born at 20 weeks, and Kaden, who unexpectedly had cardiomyopathy due to a rare virus called ciHHV-6. He died in her arms at 3 weeks old.
In 2014 she traveled with World Vision to learn about maternal health and infant mortality in Zimbabwe, and is now working on her Master’s in Mental Health Counseling. You can also find her work on Babble, Liberating Working Moms, She Reads Truth, The New York Times, and The Huffington Post.
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