Seeing your child mourning is sad, the scary part is the fact that he is mourning a sibling who died before (in all honesty) he (Aidan I mean) was even a consideration.

Cloud watching with mommy

On what should have been Logan’s birthday I am looking at my living son, and I’m worried about this state of mourning he seems to be in? surely this isn’t normal is it?

How can you mourn someone you never met? Well, Logan died before I could see him alive, and I sure as heck am not over his loss, is it the same thing?

Flip I don’t know. I know that when we do our prayers, he slips in a “God, could you send Logan back, so we can play a little”. I know he asks me how a God who can do anything could not send his brother back. He knows Logan died before he was born and has done the math so he tells people he has a six-year-old brother who is in heaven.

I usually interject with the fact that he actually only lived two days. This upsets Aidan because, obviously, the angels must be celebrating his brother’s birthday and he is now six.

You may or may not know but we live next door to my parents. My brother’s son Liam lived with them, until about a month ago. They moved out and it shattered Aidy. He says things like, why don’t we get to keep babies, why does God make our babies go away.

He is a very open child. WAY TOO OPEN AT TIMES. So I have heard him tell people about his family…His “siblings” cousin brothers, Caleb and Liam and the brother in heaven Logan.

A random woman told me (as my son is sitting on my lap all emotional because she felt the need to pry into the Logan part of his “do you have siblings?” answer) That I shouldn’t have told him about Logan as it clearly upsets him.

I didn’t tell him much actually. He has seen that his footprints aren’t the only ones on the mantel. He has asked about our tattoos and also, he is an intelligent boy who we don’t lie to, so when he asked we gave him a simple answer; “Logan was our son who went to heaven before you were born”. It’s the truth, its pretty crappy but it’s true.

I don’t have a shrine to my deceased son, and I don’t make my living son live up to some weird replacement role. He is just too damn big for his boots and is a sensitive child who reckons it’s not fair that other people get to keep their brothers and sisters…

My son is mourning a sibling and I’m just over here doubting my every move. I don’t know what to say or how to act. How the flip do you act when you hear that your son and his cousin were standing out in the rain trying to get sick and hopefully die and see Logan. YES, this happened last week.

I’m in tears as I write this, plus my anxiety has me feeling like some of you are reading this thinking I’m being dramatic or that I somehow have an agenda and have been feeding Aidy these thoughts and memories to keep Logan alive in him. Cause I sure as heck have not.

 The year Aidan was born was a year of death death death. Well, it started the year before with his brother and two of my friends. He was born right after Robin’s father and my Godmother passed. I have lived a life of “unfinished mourning” for almost six years now. I need a good cry and a stomp and a stir, but I don’t do that because I need to be strong for him. Because he somehow has got it into his four-year-old head that he is here to protect me so I need to be IRON, TITANIUM even, and I am mostly, generally.

I wonder if me trying to be to strong has messed him up. He was born with this tendency to cry in his sleep, my mom once said (she’s quite literally a poet so didn’t mean it literally) that he was born mourning, born woeful because he was conceived of two broken hearts who were once again broken the month before his birth (that month is this month by the way). Maybe my breast milk was laced with tears.

Okay obviously I’m not being serious , it’s just that my mind goes off into a hundred different directions when I consider that my kid is legitimately mourning a sibling he has never known and honestly I don’t know what to do.

A while back I opened up about it on Facebook  and received so many messages from people in similar situations. Kids who draw their long lost siblings into school pictures, who insist on celebrating their birthdays and somehow have made it their duty to keep the memory of their siblings alive…

*Disclaimer… Aidan very seldomly cries in his sleep these days, that was for the first month or so. He is not a child filled with heart break and woe, he is a bubbly extrovert who loves to share his story (his story being telling people about his family and school) and LOVES learning about other people. He is basically a less neurotic me. So don’t be too worried about him, He is a happy kid, that just happens to be missing someone he has never met. He wants to have a ton of kids one day, or maybe just look after other people’s babies and tells me that most brothers are annoying but he is sure that Logan would never have been.

So ja, here on the day that my son should have celebrated his 6th birthday… I have a question. How do I help my husband and son deal with a loss that I myself am still pretty cut up about. How even?