Broken Promises

Chapter 1 - Brutal Honesty

Everything I am writing here to you, my daughter, is the truth to the best of my recollection. I have added nothing for dramatic effect or taken away to save face. I admit that I have lost many memories, swept away in the ethos, and some may even be wrong or misremembered. I have lost large expanses of time. One therapist chalked it up to PTSD, another to extreme emotional trauma and chronic sleep deprivation, still another to the brain trying to protect itself. Whatever the reason, there is much missing. While I wake from night terrors many nights of you dying repeatedly still to this day, I have a hard time remembering your face. I try to remember the touch of your little fingers as they reflexively clasp around mine, but even that is gone.

I vividly remember how to set your ventilator with my eyes closed. Your medication doses are clear in my head. I easily remember how it felt to give you chest compressions while breathing for you to try to restart your heart as the ambulance raced to the house. I remember the blue color in your face as you faded away. I remember my first image of you after you were born where you were as white as a sheet with no breath in your body. Yet I cannot remember how you felt in my arms as I held you. I remember the sounds of your machine alarms and even wake to them going off as recently as days ago as the nightmares turn into terror as the dreams remain true even when my eyes open. I do not remember the warmth of your breath against my cheek, but I cringe thinking of the vile smell of the hand soap from the NICU. I remember your cold skin when I kissed you goodbye for the last time at the funeral home. I hear the ventilator and oxygen concentrator, but I have forgotten most of who you were. Many days I wonder if you ever existed, and if you did not, then why am I so broken and alone?

Grief is like dye. Once the color drips into the soul, it can never be removed. It seeps into every crevice and forever alters the color of every part, never to be the original color again.

In the end, more questions exist than answers, more regrets than triumphs, more pain than happiness. I am lost. I am a fractured soul of nothingness without you.