Cold comfort, warm thoughts

I'm usually cold. Inhumanly freezing hands and feet my husband has teased me always (summer and winter) during our nearly 17 years of marriage. But since losing our baby George I've been icy cold, frozen - even during the summer heat wave. Interestingly, three other bereaved mothers I've corresponded with have said they were also freezing with cold for weeks and even months after the loss of their children. It must be an actual physical reaction to the shock of the sudden and unexpected deaths of our children, which makes sense.

I've spent several afternoons wrapped in the blanket gifted to us by our friends at the Squamish Nation mission church where we had George's funeral. The children were each given a quilt by the lovely staff at the playgroup we've attended for years run by Family Services of the North Shore. They led me into a room where they had more than 60 donated quilts set out and I got to pick a quilt for each child, meant to comfort them and be a special reminder of their little baby brother who was stillborn in May. These special quilts are all created by the Grouse Mountain Day Quilters Guild and donated for Family Services to give as they see fit to families working through things like bereavement. And of course the quilt we were given in hospital that wrapped our infant as we held him those few precious hours has a special place in my bedroom and also in my heart. I'm always going to think of quilts and blankets now as well as casseroles when I hear of a bereaved family.

We bought our first home and moved at the end of June. While I spent a lifetime moving as a military brat, this has to be the first time I've really suffered leaving friends in another community and not looked forward to meeting new people. It's hard to start new friendships when I feel so broken, so utterly not myself, after losing my son. I'm not up to mixing and chatting when I feel like just crying.

Paradoxically of course, now is when I need friends to laugh and cry with. Those people who won't judge me for swinging between smiles and tears, who will understand why I have to be out for the other children but don't feel like myself. I have met only a few mothers with children here, but of course they're vacationing and so on, and it's been really a lonely time for all my children to have no regular playmates. And so we go into the sunroom with our blankets and books to cuddle and spend time as a family, moving through our grief.

The last few months have been filled with so much pain, but also so much love to get us through this heartbreak. And sometimes that love and those memories are made tangible by bits of fabric, sewn and gifted to such good purpose for us to still feel supported even though we've moved away.