5 Years

We woke today to our two sweet girls climbing into our bed for morning snuggles, but there was a void there. The same void that is there every morning. A five year old boy is missing from the heap of giggles and little warm bodies snuggled under the blankets between us. Aaron would be five today. He would have started kindergarten this year. He would be a big brother to two adoring little sisters.  I can't seem to wrap my mind around that...five years. It seems like an eternity since I last held him and felt his soft cheeks against my own, yet only yesterday since the whirlwind of his arrival and his precious three days on earth.

They say that time heals all wounds. In some ways, yes, but so often now the ache in my heart is deeper, more intimate, than the past few years. Our sweet boy is on my mind daily, yet the week of his birthday always draws me back to the sacred details of the minutes and hours he was with us. I will myself to focus on the good, to remember him just freshly born...before the wires, tubes and incisions, but the guarded details of our last night with him still haunt me and I imagine they always will. Even five years later it seems that that part of grief still wins, every single time.

With perfect clarity, I remember the moment that we gave his doctors and nurses permission to finally stop cpr and we surrendered his beautiful life back to Jesus. Since that time, we have continued to live life with the utmost faith in the story that God is unfolding for us. We have been blessed with two amazing daughters, and it is during these times, as we raise them and walk through life with them, that the deep ache in my heart for Aaron is evermore present and palpable. As we watch our girls grow, we are living the reality of everything that he is missing...as a little boy, as a big brother, as our son. From the big milestones such as his first day of school, to the mundane annoyances of a big brother picking on his little sisters, I feel the hole that he left in my heart stretch, widen and try to accommodate a little boy's lifetime of memories that are going by without him. Oh how we miss you, sweet boy.

Happy 5th Birthday, Aaron Matthew! Thank you for making us parents... for making us a family. Your perfect little heart split ours wide open and taught us what it is to love unconditionally. Celebrate big up there, little man. We love you always, to the moon and back...