Learning to live with unimaginable loss is really fucking hard. I have been “lucky” on my journey with losing Shaylyn to have been blessed by so many kind and humble and giving people. People who have lead me on my path to healing and who have gifted me things that can never be repaid, but I will dedicate my life to trying to pay that forward in Shay’s memory. The first gift I was given was immediately upon Shaylyn being born. That gift was a Cuddle Cot that was donated to my hospital by another mama whose son, Landon was stillborn. Her hospital did not have a Cuddle Cot, because they are deemed “not medically necessary”, therefore not in the budget. She took her heartbreak over her son’s death and not being given the option to spend any time with him and turned it into bestowing kindness onto others. Here is the article chronicling her donation, which was posted online during the time I was in labor with Shaylyn. https://www.telegram.com/news/20180803/helping-bereaved-parents-to-say-goodbye-at-umass-memorial-medical-center.

Because of Amy and her family and their grief and love for Landon, I was able to spend time with my daughter. My family was able to come. All of her aunties and uncles and grandparents got to hold her and love her and say whatever they needed to, to her. We have pictures of Shaylyn because of this family. There is no way to ever repay that, but loving gifts from strangers to strangers changes lives. Lesson one.

Lesson two on love and giving and support came pretty early on as well. I had been given a list of support groups from the hospital when I was discharged. I went to one, it was me alone and the two ladies running it, who I’m sure in any other scenario are lovely people, but not in this one for me. It was maybe a month after Shaylyn died and I knew pretty early on that I would not be able to survive this alone. I needed to find people who understood. In that meeting alone with the two women, I was just barraged with questions for an hour, it felt like an interrogation and I left feeling super defeated and like no one was ever going to “get it”. I then tried this place I had found a brochure on about meditation for grief, again I was pretty apt to try anything that could possibly relieve just a tiny sliver of the glass penetrating my heart every second of my life. Again I was all alone with one woman. This one was an angel in disguise though, and also a legit “angel” in a newly formed support group. Now I don’t recall if I told her about Shaylyn or she just intuited what was going on, but she gave me a brochure for Hope Lives Here. I don’t believe in coincidences and my friend, Marie, has private messaged me the name of this group just days earlier. I decided to email them because I couldn’t handle another situation of being grilled for an hour by multiple people. I asked if this was an active group and if other people actually showed up or if I would be in there alone with the facilitators. I was told it was an extremely active group. So I took a chance and went to their next meeting. And when I say that meeting changed the course of my life and my healing journey forever, that is not an exaggeration. I probably had a panic attack before I walked in, its all very blurry. I did not speak a word, I couldn’t. I just sat there and cried the entire time. They wrapped up the meeting and I thought, God idk if this is for me either. And then it happened, unbeknownst to me I was sitting next to the master of grief support herself. The creator of this group, the one and only Miss Patty. But I was unaware of that fact at this moment. At this moment she just became this saving grace of an angel when she turned straight to me and said “you lost a little, didn’t you?” To this day I cannot type those words without tears welling up in my eyes. If you have never had someone fully see you in your grief and “get it”, I can’t explain this feeling. But it changed me. I understood in that moment that support was not platitudes that had been thrown my way daily, support was this. Support was getting it. I didn’t know at the time that she knew because she was also me. Her son Luke’s death and the support she received was the impetus for her to start this group, with her gaggle of angels around her. Hope Lives Here has expanded and changed from that first meeting I attended almost 3 years ago now that I first walked through those doors. They have their own space now, and we don’t meet at a library anymore. There are specialized groups now for subsets of loss. We have of general loss groups, child loss groups, addiction loss groups, suicide loss groups, and partner loss groups. The people that belong to this support group are an amazing array of broken hearted people who just love each other, they love the people we’ve lost with each other, and they are there with you on your worst days and on your best, just cheering you on and letting you know that everything you feel is normal and they also have felt those feelings. I will never be able to repay these people either, but this is my little effort to pass on all this love that has been freely and selflessly given to me. Anyone missing someone please check out HLH.

https://www.hopeliveshere.xyz/.

They also do zoom meetings now, the pandemic making that loving support reach even further.

These women are my teachers, they are my healing, and they are my inspiration in knowing that any act of kindness from the smallest to the largest changes lives. So lets all pass that on