do over

Everything is hard… everything reminds me of her.

I just really want to have an experience where its not hard..

do i really?

will I just be overwhelmed with guilt that day?

We went to Ikea last week. Our kids are outgrowing the table we have..When she was in treatment we went there one time. We looked at a table and I said I would talk to Daddy about getting it…

I remembered being there with her and my sister. How she let Jennifer pick out her christmas gift early.. a purple tv tray. .. She loved it. We used it a lot..starting that afternoon. Our first proper tea party at our little apartment in Palo Alto. .. then I used it to show her movies on my computer… then to organize her medications.. now to write..

 

 

 

We bought the table last week. It’s so hard for me to have something new in the house.. something her hands didn’t touch. I’m glad that at least she helped me pick it out originally.. won’t always be like that though.. .one day… .

no.no.no.

I just realized one day everything she touched will be gone. I am going to live so many wretched days without her that all the things will have worn out.. ..

Sometimes this blog helps me.. it gives me a space to sort out my thoughts and feelings.. It allows me time to grieve her and remember her.  Every once in awhile though I have moments of clarity like that..they make make me want to slam my computer shut and walk away.

Yesterday we took the 3 littler kids to the zoo. It was a long drive..somehow I ended up day dreaming about how tall our good friends daughter will be.. My mind then wandered to start thinking of her and Jennifer as teenagers together.. what they will look like walking down the street.

I smile.

I remember.

I want to scream. I can’t. I am locked in a car with my living babies.

At the zoo that feeling came back. In a convoluted way I found myself understanding these animals in confinement. Its what my grief is like. Trapped in a whole new place.. It all looks the same as my natural habitat.

But its not. Its too small. There is no way out.

People peering in at me have no idea how broken I truly am.

Walking around we got so many compliments on our kids.. how beautiful they are.. What a perfect little family we look like… no idea how shattered we all are.

Afterwards my parents took the boys for a sleepover and I went to crossfit. Tony went to get started on a memorial tattoo…they got a lot of it done. It’s already beautiful.

i hate it

A tattoo for a daughter that isn’t supposed to be dead.

Last night instead of blogging I worked on my speech for the event I am lucky enough to get to share our story at in a week. And I cried. I walked around the almost empty house…just me and baby Charlotte.. and I talked to her. The wound feels so exposed when I talk to her like that.. but I love the pain. That pain.. that to the core of me grief, is my relationship with her.

It wasn’t part of my life plan… it’s not the relationship I yearned for..  but its where we are .. I forget how much more I feel connected to her

…like her mommy again when I talk aloud to her. ..

So last night was girls night in the Kranz household. It started at dinner and didn’t stop til Tony came home.

The night we got the new prognosis.. that we learned that the weeks of radiation didn’t really buy us more time.. we made a bucket list. I had done this over the summer with the kids.. I made a huge chart of the things we wanted to do over the summer before Jennifer started kindergarten. I had no idea that would literally be her bucket list.. we got almost everything crossed off.. minus a SJ baseball game.

That night we made a new one.. this time knowing it was our last chance. We didn’t get to cross anything off that list.. She lived… survived.. struggled.. for 2.5 more weeks.. but not well enough to do anything on the list.

We put one thing on the list for Jonathan.. something he had been asking for..  we thought we had time to do it .. even with a grim prognosis of 9 months we put things off.

“camp in the dance room all together”

We wanted to do something to make good and lasting memories for the boys too. This was something we added with them in mind. Thankfully we didn’t tell them because we couldn’t make it happen.

We tried tonight though. Tony set up the tent we just bought. . He was so happy when he saw it.

Didn’t make it though. He wanted to go back to his room to sleep.  When I laid in bed with him at almost 10 pm.. 3 hours past his bedtime.. he struggled to settle down. He just kept talking. And he shared his first totally out of left field memory of Jennifer.. It was one moment from the glitter photo shoot.

.. .he wanted me in the tent too tonight. I said no.

can I get a do over? That should have been a yes.

And again the blog has brought me full circle… to a place I’m not sure I want to be.

He missed Jennifer.. on some level he I think he knew she was supposed to be there with them. That it wasn’t supposed to be a boys only time. We tried buddy boy we really did.. next time we will have pictures of her in the tent.. next time I will get in with you… 

“camp in the dance room all together”

That’s what he had requested when we came home from Stanford.. we said “not now but soon. ”

His sister is dead now.. we will never get the chance .. . there is no soon.

can I get a do over?

that should have been a yes.