The Spare Bedroom

Last night, I went through Beckett’s room and things for the last time.  I say “Beckett’s room” because it was.  We selected a color with him in mind.  We moved things from his big sisters room to that one.  I even made a late February IKEA trip for him, my 20 week anatomy scan and his subsequent diagnosis just weeks away, with no concept of how my life was going to change.  Yesterday was the third time I have gone through all of Beckett’s belongings.  The first time was immediately after his death.  Everything was fresh and raw.  I had this weird notion in my mind that I should go through everything right then, when everything was bleeding anyway.  It was crazy, but ended up being the right thing to do.  I knew what everything was being that so short an amount of time had passed, and then had everything close for whenever I might want things.  Because in the heat of the beginning, I wanted everything within reach.  The second time I sorted through it was the week before the memorial.  I had a good sense of where certain things were but it still required a genuine hunt through it all.  Over this last weekend, Tyler and I set up a memory corner for our boy in our home.  We hung pictures and selected keepsakes.  It was healing and hurtful both.  Then after, I started the room organization process again.  It was the most sensible, slow, and deliberate devotion of the three different times.  I did well through the whole process, up until late in the evening.

Each time I have gone through Beckett’s things, I have done so in “his” bedroom.  Each time I have sat cross-legged in his room and moved things from box to box, from pile to pile.  And last night, I did that again.  But I did so with the intention of sharing some things out in our home, and putting the rest somewhere safe and away.  Side by side, I handled his charming stuffed animals and his cremation certificate.  Congratulations cards and sympathy cards all in the same box.  Some of the things I think I will be happy to never look at again, and some I fingered much longer than I needed, still caught in the shell-shock that he is gone.

I took some special things to keep with us, in our room.  Things I don’t want to have to climb in to the crawlspace to visit with.  And some things I was comfortable giving to his big sister or saving for the possibility of a younger sibling one day.  But the majority of the physical remains of Beckett’s story moved in to a plastic tote yesterday.  And it isn’t even that big of one.  My baby’s whole life in a single twenty five gallon box.  I knew that was sad, and it resonated on some deep level.  But grief is a bell that gets rung so many times a day that you learn to move through the vibration rather than shake and break under it.  I was moving there pretty good.  All day in fact.  Until I finished out the night and went to turn off the bedroom light.

I’d moved the last of the crafts and trash, remainders of the memorial service.  The room is lovely and clean.  It’s a nice soft gray, a crib in the corner, a dresser, and changing table.  The closet has a laundry hamper and is stocked with diapers, all gifts.  It all brings me to a stop, and I tell myself to acknowledge the moment.  And I do what I do at least one hundred times a day.  I wonder about Beckett.  But this time I did what always hurts the most, and I imagined him here with me, like I can’t help but do.  And I imagine what it would be like if he was laying in that crib.  Soundly, or maybe not soundly at all.  Maybe he is cranky, and I am tired, but I don’t care.  Because I love being a mommy and I love my son.  And maybe we sit in the recliner together.  The recliner I held his sister in so many times before.  Maybe it’s the middle of the night, in a quiet sleepy moment together.  Or during the day as the trees make gentle shadows on the walls.  And maybe we are just a mother and a son, as I had dreamt we would be.  With no medical complications or surgeries behind us or in front of us.  No plane of existence now separating us.  And so I cracked.  It was a lot of pressure, to pack away a child.  And of course that is not what I did in so many ways.  But in some, I really did.

Yesterday, Beckett’s room went back to being the spare bedroom.  If you went in to that room now, you would see a nursery, but not for a particular baby.  There are toys and clothes and furniture all suiting an infant.  And for the last year, that infant was Beckett.  But now it is something else for someone else.  What I do love about yesterday is that Beckett has now moved in to all of the house.  His “corner” is two walls and a bookshelf of memories, sprawled out in a beautiful assortment of him.  We hung his pictures in the living room and in our room.  The little box of special things is beside our bed.  Moira even took a picture out of the pile and ran off to put it in her room.  Beckett is in all of the places that we normally are now, and I love to see him.  I wanted Beckett to live in that room, and that wasn’t meant to be.  But he is still living at home with us.

Sometimes it feels like Beckett’s diagnosis just happened.  That he’s coming and he is fine and there has been some kind of mistake.  It’s strange how as humans, in the face of something truly horrible, our mind will play tricks on us.  It isn’t thinking about what “is,” but instead “what if’s” that hits us hardest.  When you teeter on the edge of thinking something is just within reach, when truly it’s less in reach than the moon.  A momentary hope this is all a bad dream, at the same time realizing bad dreams don’t last an entire year.  Packing up his room was another hard reminder of the truth about Beckett and what his fate was.  And it was definitely something worth breaking over as I stood silent in the dark of what I had hoped would be his.