why me?

Beautiful perspecitive Gal. Grief is very self centred in the way where it does become more about the survivor and what we've lost. I find myself asking "Why me?" all the time. In fact I have felt I have had a huge black cloud hanging over my head for most of my life. If something bad is going to happen then it usually happens to me. It may seem a stretch to most, in fact my husband used to laugh when I'd say it but after we had been together for some time, he started to realize there was some truth to what I was saying. We'd go out for dinner and there would be bugs in my food, or hair. We'd go to the pub and some obnoxious drunk would spill an entire pitcher of beer on me within minutes of being there. When we tried to have children it was miscarriage after miscarriage while everyone around us seemed to be blossoming in pregnant bliss. I have no answers. For awhile I felt as if I were being punished by God or the powers that be for not being a good enough person. For the bad things I've done in my life. I imagined God looming over me decreeing "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth..." after I had tried to no avail to have a child years after having an abortion. When it was discovered that Calvin had a heart defect in utero at my twenty week scan, shamefully my first thought was "Why our boy?". We already had a daughter and were desperately wanting a son. Not that I would have wanted Georgia to have the defect Calvin had by any means, but I felt that because I wanted him so badly, of course it was going to be our boy that had the defect. I have searched, mostly in vain trying to come up with a sense of why as to everything went the way it did. I have had a few suggestions from friends that seem to bring me some comfort, a few different and beautiful ways of looking at our situations. My friend Bill wrote me in an email shortly following Calvin's death that upon hearing our news, he was shaken to the core. He went out to his garage and began to pray for something to help us get through this awful pain. The answer to Bill became perfectly clear. We had been trying for so long to bring our first daughter a sibling, the first time we tried had ended in miscarriage, another little girl with a genetic disorder called Turner Syndrome. Bill felt that God had sent Calvin to guide Georgia safely into the world so that our daughter would have a sister and that we would have another child. Bill felt that once Calvin's purpose had been fulfilled, that it was time for him to return home, that he had done all he was supposed to do in this lifetime. It gave me pause for thought and became a beautiful answer to the why's? Another thought from my friend Jesse who's son Oliver also has Truncus Arteriosus (Calvin's heart defect), was that our boys wanted us to be their parents so badly that they were willing to take whatever body, no matter how broken, to come down to earth from heaven to be with us. I like that answer too. I'd like to think that Calvin chose us, not because of how we would cope with his death but because of how we loved him when he was here. Our son was loved fiercely, from the moment of conception to the diagnosis of his broken heart, to his birth, surgery and death. Every moment of his life became about him, protecting him, giving him the best chance, the most love. Even after being removed from life support, he stayed with us for over an hour, nestled in our arms, taking as much love as he needed to go back with. I'm sure if he were here he would tell me that it was because I had already lost so much. That he came to me in his broken body because he knew that I would do whatever it took to help him survive, that I would sacrifice everything I had for him. He came to me because he was so very wanted that he knew I would accept him no matter what problems came with him, that I would love him without limits or expectations. He came to me because I was willing and ready to fight for his life with everything I had, even if it had meant giving him my own heart. It doesn't make it any easier to live without him, but thoughts like this soften the sharp edges of the pain and makes it a little less about me and more about him. About his choices and his sacrifice for being here with us.