No Room.

It's Christmas.  I'm sure bloggers everywhere are posting pictures full of joy, love, laughter, and torn wrapping paper.  And so should I.  They will come.  I do have them, I do cherish them, and I do want to show them.  But tonight, my heart is in a different place and so it's only fair that I am transparent. 

I'm moving in 3 days.  After 5 years in the same house, I will have a new space, in a different zip code.  No memories have been created there, and yet so many have been created here.  I look forward to moving.  To a fresh start.  To new walls and new decorations.  To purging and cleansing through the packing and unpacking process.  But nostalgia is never far. 

And neither is the grief that has lived, breathed, slept, and kept itself contained within the walls of this house.

In three days I will leave behind not just memories from 5 years, not just my deep red bedroom with accented black walls, the modern shining armor gray living room walls, or Emma's hand painted cherry blossom tree and happy perched owls wall mural....I'm also leaving behind Logan's room.  The only room he ever had...the only room he will ever have.

And it hits.  A brick thrown through the dark, landing in the center of my heart, weighing me down.

Logan will never have another room.  Ever.

From the moment I found out I was pregnant with Logan, I sensed the heroic spirit within him.  Mother's intuition, I guess.  It's hard to explain unless you've felt it, witnessed it.  I didn't know at the time what his future would be...and sometimes, it still doesn't make sense.  But other times, I know, he was the hero I needed for my own spirit...and I know he has a job to do in a universe that I am not yet welcome in.  While dreaming of my soon to be born son, a phrase played in my heart and mind "Heroes are born in our dreams..."  Logan's bedroom would be Firefighters after Ryan's dream.  And it fit my hero theme too. 

So Logan and I, my hand, his baby spirit within my womb, painted these words on his walls, speaking life into his room and the atmosphere I longed to created.

 

His nursery was perfect.  And it was nearly complete even at 6 months pregnant.  We were excited new parents and I was a planner.  I spent many nights rocking in that room, singing and talking to my growing belly, reciting those words to Logan.

 

After four years, the room has changed quite a bit.  It's been a guest bedroom and a storage room, and it's currently a mixture of both.  But those words, HIS WORDS, still remain.  I couldn't bring myself to paint over them.  And no matter what that room was at any given point in time, it was always still...Logan's room.

 

In three days I will leave it behind.  In three days I will say goodbye to what was, what should have been.  Logan never spent a single second in that room outside of the womb.  But he spent so many days and nights in that room with me with me.

 

The walls will be painted.  Someone new will move in.  The room will belong to someone else.  The atmosphere will change.

 

And Logan will never again, on this earth, during my lifetime, have a room.

 

There's no words for that sinking feeling, that reality.

 

Four years later the grief can still be so raw and so real, as if it happened yesterday.  The days are easier.  Life takes over and gets busy.  I don't dwell.  I'm not depressed.  I can breathe again most days.  But triggers still exist.  New and old.  That will never change.

 

Logan isn't in that room.  Never was and never will be.  He is not contained by walls.  But my human heart grieves for the few tangible things I have to connect my once reality of his brief existence in the flesh.

 

So this Christmas, I celebrate the joy in my daughter's eyes.  The glow of her cheeks with her big smile. 

 

But I also grieve the absence of my son, and the room he will never have again.

 

 

And that's ok.  It's always a balancing act.  After four years, I'm getting much better at dancing on that tight rope and maintaining my balance.