The “F” word (not what you think).

Tonight I can’t sleep for many reasons but the main one is that I can’t stop thinking about the  f word.

Funeral home.

The place I sometimes passed on a drive here or there but never imagined I would someday be walking into to plan the burial of my daughter. Today marks 6 weeks since we have birth to Eisley and we have yet to burry her.Yep, you heard right. Part of the reason F word is always on my mind because our daughter is still there. We have yet to even buy a plot and I’m reminded of that every day because we live a few blocks from the cemetery where she will be burried. I can’t even bring myself to call and make the final arrangements for her burial and honestly I think it’s for that very reason. Final arrangements seems so official.

She is gone.

We are reminded of this everyday and yet sometimes it still stuns me that this is our reality. She is gone. I don’t want to watch them put her in the ground because it feels so awful even thinking about it.

The other reason the F word is still on my mind is because they are going to call us any day now and tell us we need to come and get her body or we need to buy a plot and get it over with. Of course, they will probably not be so direct and blunt as I just was, but that’s pretty much the jist of it.

The first time we walked into the funeral home, they had no idea who we were. There was a mix up and somehow a different Alnutt Funeral Home had all of our information. It took so much to muster enough strength for us to even walk through their front doors and then they didn’t even know who we were or why we were there.

The second time we went in, just a few days later, they had us sit in a room with a really nice lady and fill out a bunch of paper work. When she asked me the name of my daughter and how to spell it, I made it through E-I-S-L-E-Y and by the time I got to her middle name I couldn’t even speak. I just kept thinking, “this isn’t happening” although clearly it was. After the paperwork came the hardest part… picking out an urn to put our daughter in. She handed us a booklet with a bunch of different urns. All of them just looked so awful. Like death. Like I was in a funeral home picking out an urn. As we were looking through the choices, she told us that she knew of a few really pretty ones and ran and grabbed another book.

Ted and I both just really wanted to get out of there quickly, but we had both talked prior to coming in, about picking out a beautiful urn so we waited. When she came back we flipped through the pages and Ted stopped and pointed to a beautiful pink and black coloured urn with a flower on the front of it and said, “That one. It reminds me of you.” We’ve talked about how Eisley probably would have been a lot like me  so that one just felt so perfect.  That might sound weird, picking out a “beautiful” urn and I can’t really, honestly find the words to explain why but it helped a little.

Walking out of the funeral home was a relief  and an incredibly sickening feeling all at the same time. It all just seems so official. And to think of burrying her… I can’t even go there. It’s going to take the same strength to burry her as it was to walk into the funeral home the first time… and then again the second time. The same strength it took to go through 3 days of labor (and I don’t mean physical strength), the strength it takes to get up everyday, the strength it takes to get out of the house, the same strength it took for me to go to my follow up appointment, etc, etc, etc…

I feel like we’re in a valley right now, where the sun can’t shine because it’s so deep. It feels so lonely and dark and scary because there are a lot of unknowns behind and ahead of us.  Along the way we’ve stumbled again and again at the painful reminders that she is gone and sometimes it takes us a day or two or more to get back up. But I know, deep inside, that if we can keep moving forward, our feet will once again walk upon ground where the sun is shining bright.