It has started.  Something everyone told me couldn’t happen, but the rational part of me knew would.  I am starting to forget.  I have noticed countless times during this past year that people often deny things that make them uncomfortable.  Things like a bereaved parent forgetting details about their own child.  But all the while they are denying it could happen, it already is.

All parents are guilty of forgetting some of the countless moments they witness in their offsprings’ life, but we are normally replacing those moments with new ones.  I struggle to recall exactly what my older, surviving child sounded like when she cried as an infant, or exactly how she slept at night.  Because as she grows, my imagery of her does too.  As she changes, my mind is refreshed with my understanding of her.  Less memories of a squalling newborn and new memories of a rambunctious preschooler.  But this “refresh” does not exist for Beckett.  What I had of him is all I ever will.  The memories of him that are lost are not replaced, only lost.

April 3rd marked four months since Beckett’s passing.  We are quickly approaching more time without him than we had with him, and as the months go by, I know that my memories are becoming cloudy.  I don’t know how I feel about it. When I see the death of another child, I find myself comparing.  Sometimes I am filled with pity, and a selfish gratefulness that I am so far removed from the immediacy of Beckett’s death.  Other times I find myself envious, that they can recall their baby so clearly, as my memories of mine fade and morph.  Which is better?  To have just lost your child and have them fresh in your senses?  Their scent still upon your arms.  Or perhaps the numbness of time is an improvement?  To let the rawness be grown over, a shiny scar rather than a gaping wound. I can’t tell you which it best.  As always, my peace is in the knowledge that the choice is not mine.  Chaos governs all, and newness is not an option for me, so I will make my way forward with the dull throb that is taking its place.

I am sad to be forgetting what I am, but there is much that cannot be erased, and for that I am grateful.  The most beautiful eyes I have ever seen with my own.  The feel of his skin, often stretched, but still sweet and warm as I lay my hand upon him.  His little toes, perfect, as baby feet always are.  Waiting for his head to be placed in the crook of my arm and speaking softly to him.  It seems monumental occasions are immune to slipping my minds grasp.  But it aches to lose any of the days we had together when there were only one hundred and thirty six of them.

Does this mean I am moving past the pain as recollection gets harder?  Never.  While I am losing fragments of Beckett’s life, I will never forget the pain that comes with the loss of my child.  Special moments are saved, but alongside them are horrible ones.  My son’s death chief among them.  I held Beckett against my chest after they removed his breathing tube as my heart thundered and my mind raced, waiting for him to die.  “Is it over?  Is he gone?  Please don’t be scared or in pain.”  I held him tight and closed my eyes and tried to create conversation between our very spirits.  Willing him to have peace at last.  Wondering when I would cease to hold Beckett and be left holding only his body.  After, as he lay on his hospital bed, I had to choose a moment to approach him for the last time.  I ran my hand through his hair and kissed him with shaky lips.  I looked at him for a final time, knowing it would be the final time.  I was deliberate in my memory making of that moment.  I turned my back, and told his nurse “okay.”  She wrapped him in plain blankets, attached a tag to them, and carried my son away.  They try to make everything as gentle as possible.  But human experience teaches us the truth about moments like these.  She was going to hand him off to someone who had never met him.  He was going to the hospital basement, to lay in a morgue.  And I was never going to see him again.

I am not partial to suffering.  And a lot of my experience with Beckett was that.  I am not surprised that my mind and heart are making work to conceal some of the dark things we trudged through this year.  So let them go.  Let things blur and slip back to nonexistence.  But while some of my memories disappear, what definitively remains is what Beckett meant to me.  What it feels like to be his mother.  The etchings on my soul that were created by him are now a permanent part of me.  They are effortless and require no remembrance to embody.  I carry him in all my motions and all my thoughts.  I’m going to forget things, and the screaming within me is subsiding.  I still hear the echoes but they are not so scary as they were before.  I will not be frightened to remember, or to forget.  Unafraid to move forward and to also look back.  I will not be parted from Beckett’s essence anymore than I can be parted from my own.  That is what is truly undeniable.