10 Months

Inconceivably Harry passed over 10 months ago today. It just doesn't seem possible to me that he has been gone for 10 whole months, nearly a year. I look at around-one-year old boys and think to myself, "Oh, that would be my Harry". But then I remind myself, "No, Harry would be over two now. He'd be so much bigger than that. He'd be walking and talking and running and riding his trike on his own."

Lydia assures me he does all of these things in Heaven, and I'm sure she is right.

Now, more than ever, time seems like such a strange thing. It feels alternatively like yesterday and like a long time ago that Harry was here with us and that he was so sick. I wonder if the surreal sense of this whole experience will ever go away? I still find it so hard to wrap my head around the fact that any and all of this has happened. I keep expecting someone to wake me up and tell me it was all a bad dream, none of it really happened. It's over, here, you can have Harry back now. I just shake my head. You're kidding, right? This is real? This really happened? My little baby boy really died of cancer? You've got to be kidding? None of this can be real, right?

I suppose I am getting used to this, this 'new normal' that we find ourselves in. The longing to see and hold and physically touch Harry is not quite so acute. I feel like we have settled into this new arrangement, the three of us, Henry, Lyddie and me, here in the physical plane, and Harry an Angel, doing his work with God. The funny thing is, we are still, and I realize always will be, a family of four.

When Harry first passed over I thought I was going to have to get used to being a family of three again. My sense of dislocation and disorientation at this thought and experience was immense and overwhelming. It is like trying to walk when the Earth has tilted on a wild angle. I guess you could do it, by learning how to walk holding your body at some strange angle, but it would never feel natural. We can never really "go back" to being a family of three again. We're not. We're a family of four. It's just that one of us is a bit further away. So it is really getting used to being a "family of four but where one of the kids has left home way, way, way sooner than expected". Harry will always be an integral part of our family. I truly believe that his soul lives on and he is simply walking with the Angels now.

It still takes getting used to, but not in the way that I thought it was going to. I don't have to "get used" to Harry being "dead". Harry has left his physical body, that body has been returned to ash. But that which was truly Harry, the light, the love, the immense joy, the spirit, that can never die. That has just changed form, or left the physical form. Its simple physics really. Matter and energy. First law of thermodynamics - energy can be neither created nor destroyed, it merely changes form.

So, while the physical possibility that was Harry here with us is no longer. Harry, the energy that was Harry, lives on. So it is more getting used to this altered arrangement of the four of us. And most days, I think we have. I talk to Harry every day, as I know Lydia and Henry do too. He is just so much a part of us that it only feels natural. I still mourn the loss of all of my dreams of how life would have been with Harry here with us. But I am learning to let those dreams go with love. To not hold any of us captive to those dreams of things that will not be. But instead, focus on creating wonderful dreams of the future that we can create.

An old saying goes something like, "You can give your children but two things, one is roots and the other wings." Give them roots to keep them grounded through tough times. Give them wings to soar above everything, explore new worlds and fly farther than we ever did.

I like to think we have given Harry both - his roots and his wings. We just gave him his wings a lot sooner than we had expected. I kind of think of him off at "Angel College". Studying with the angels, doing the work of the angels. I think he must be a very good angel.

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Yesterday, a courier from Cancer Care Manitoba came by the house to pick up the remainder of Harry's unused medical supplies and a portable IV pump we've had since last August. I kept on thinking I should go by Cancer Care or the hospital and drop this stuff off. But I just can't bring myself to do it. I want to go up to CK5 sometime to see the two rocking chairs that were so kindly and lovingly donated by my Mum's Group and the Winnipeg Goldeyes Baseball Team in Harry's memory. But I just can't face going up there just yet. One day it will feel okay, I am sure. Just not yet.

Cathy, the paediatric oncology nurse, had brought the portable IV pump to the house a few days before Harry passed over. Maybe it was the Friday? It was either that day or Saturday. We had hooked up his central IV to give him some fluids, because he was having a hard time keeping anything down and we were worried about him getting dehydrated. Funny, I can't remember exactly. I think we had him on the IV from Friday to Saturday, but by Saturday, I noticed his belly was beginning to swell up again, like it had back in February when we first went to the hospital. My poor wee baby. He was so thin by this time. I wonder if he even weighed 15 lbs. It was heartbreaking to watch his belly swelling again. I couldn't do it. I just knew the fluids were going in but not coming out properly. I couldn't watch him bloat up again. So, I guess it must have been the Saturday night. The night before Harry died. I called Cathy and asked her to talk me through unhooking the IV, flushing Harry's central lines, and putting in the Heparin lock into the lumens. I had been terrified to do this. But I had watched the nurses do it so many times. I somehow knew I would eventually have to do this too. I unhooked Harry from the IV and then we went to bed with him for the last time. Though, we didn't know that then.

It took me months to organize all of the left over medical supplies. Some of them were returned quite quickly. I think Jodi took them away for us. The two feeding poles, the feeding pump, the cartons of formula, the feeding bags and tubing. Those supplies took up the entire top of our washer and dryer. The IV poles, one in Harry's room and one on the main floor, were fixtures in our house. A nuisance we had just leaned to integrate into our daily lives. But we also had boxes of feeding tubes, tape, syringes, alcohol wipes, tooth-ettes for washing Harry's mouth four times a day to prevent mouth sores, saline syringes, heparin syringes, bandages for his feeding tube, bandages and wipes for changing his central line dressing ... Extra netting to make the little chest bands I put around Harry to hold in / tuck in his central line lumens.

I had one day, last fall, managed to find the energy to put everything into one box. It was sometime in the new year, January or February, when I finally went through everything, placed all of the extra supplies in a couple of plastic bags and chose a few of each things to save, an extra feeding tube, some of his medicine syringes, some tape that I used to cut to make the bandage to hold on his feeding tube ... I put them all safely away in a box in his room.

Its kind of crazy. But I wish we had saved his 2 central line lumens. Cathy helped us cut them off right after he had passed over. We held him and carefully, gently, lovingly, pulled off the tape on his cheek holding down his feeding tube and pulled it out for the last time. Then cut off his central line. I guess Cathy must have taken it to dispose of. But I wish we had saved them. I don't know what on earth I would do with them. It is not like they were particularly attractive or anything. But they were a part of Harry and I wish I still had them.

And so now, with a ring of the door bell and a one minute exchange. The last of Harry's medical supplies are gone. There is room on the shelf in the laundry room. And another piece of 'Harriness' has been cleaned, organized, shuffled, and put away in our life.