Laena

Just thinking about my dear friend, JaLaine, tonight.  It is her daughter, Laena's, birthday today.  Laena went back home to Heavenly Father just 22 days after Eli.  Me and JaLaine were friends before this, but never close.  There wasn't a reason...we just weren't; nothing had brought us together.
It has been a tender experience to have had my heart so closely knit to JaLaine as we grieved our little ones together. 

JaLaine went in for her routine ultrasound about halfway through her pregnancy only to find that her sweet baby's heartbeat had stopped.  She then had to go to the hospital to deliver the baby that she would never meet alive.  They sent her to the hospital the next day (Wednesday), but as the process unfolded she was there much, much longer than she had hoped.  Laena was not born until Thursday making her arrival on Thanksgiving.  In some ways this just seems like extra salt in the wound.  I am not trying to speak for JaLaine.  (She is much sweeter and poetic than I am).  I am just telling the story from my perspective.  So many people didn't even know that she was pregnant.  I didn't know.  So she went from some people knowing that she was going to have a baby, to not being pregnant at all.  I feel like because of the timing of Laena's death (and JaLaine's tiny little body that kept her pregnancy a secret), Laena went unnoticed by too many people.  Again, this is my opinion.  I think that some people see it as an "oh darn...just try again...." like a battery that didn't work or a burned out light on the strand of Christmas lights.  But I assure you that a mother doesn't feel that way.  JaLaine didn't feel that way.  Her husband, Mike, didn't feel that way.  Laena's siblings didn't see it that way.

When you child dies, it just sucks.  I don't care how old they are.  I'm not saying that some ways of dying aren't more traumatic...of course some ways are.  I'm not saying the age of the child makes no difference....of course it does.  I'm just saying that no matter how it happens or what age it happens at, it sucks.  Some children are more acknowledged than others which is unfortunate and complicates your grief, but in the end, a mother is a mother.  You miss your child not matter what.  You don't feel completely whole because part of you is gone.  Your heart will ache and grieve until you are reunited.  But there is also tremendous beauty in the pain because the pain came about because of your love. I know that JaLaine continues to love and yearn for Laena.  I can't wait to meet her too.