The club.

Losing Emmett has placed Ryan and I in the worst club imaginable.  Every time we go to the cemetery, I find myself commenting about how we, and the rest of the parents who have lost children, have automatically been enrolled in this club.

"We should get jackets." I joke sadly.

I did not want to be in this club;  I never asked for membership.  I never dreamed I could experience so much love and pain at one time.  To say hello and goodbye at the same time is truly the most painful thing I've ever had to do.  My heart shattered into an innumerable amount of pieces.

One of the strangely comforting parts of this experience has been all of the other people we have connected with who have experienced something similar.  And it's funny (but not funny, you understand), but now that we've experienced this, I have this overwhelming desire to just wrap my arms around all of the other mama's who have to walk through this.  No one wants to be in this club, no one wants to lose their child, but somehow we can find good, we can find hope in one another.

To all of the other parents who have lost children, whether they were only a few weeks in the womb, or a child, or an adult…I am so sorry.  This is a burden I would not wish upon my worst enemy, truly.  My heart is broken with yours.  I understand and know the dark places this kind of experience can take you to.  For example, I laid on the floor in the nursery yesterday morning for about five hours, unable to move, unable to do anything but lay there in the dark, feeling the sharp edges of the hole in my heart.