Ok – so yesterday I stirred up somethings and I though it best I reworded what I said to make it more clear what I’m talking about. It was late and I was tired when I wrote yesterday.

Most people don’t know about my life or how it started. I am not going to go into that now, but it does have a great deal to do with the way I think about things today. Having lost my mother while 7 months pregnant with Brittany was devastating to me. It took me 5 years to get to a place of peace with her death. It was at that time that Brittany was diagnosed with Epilepsy. So I went from one type of grief to another.

When a child gets diagnosed with a chronic illness – it changes the direction of their future. You always wonder how they will turn out, if they will have all their abilities, will they be able to go to a normal school and go on to college. Get married, have children, etc. Then as time passes you realize that some of those things may not happen. The grief that you have carried begins to change again. But you press on and you keep believing that things will get better. And they do for a while.

After Brittany’s death I came to the realization that I would never see my daughter go to college, get married, have children or become the person she wanted to be. Nor would I become the person I thought I would be –  a grandmother. I dreamed of the day that I would become a doting grandmother like my own. On October 13, 2006 that was robbed of me.

So for me, loving someone so deeply as I did my mother, my grandmother and my daughter and having them die creates a sense of equating love with loss. Therefore, that is what I was talking about when I said I didn’t think love was in my future. It’s because losing one more person – well I just don’t think I’d have it in me.

My friends do not worry about me. I’m doing ok – I help others who are grieving and it helps me. But love – don’t know how that fits in the picture. I give love of myself to others in need, but to give love from my heart like the love I had for Brittany – well – it just doesn’t seem possible. The pain is too deep and too hard to bare.

Most of this is covered in much more detail in the book, which should be done by the end of the summer.

More on that later,

until next time,

M