Your due date is coming up.

I can’t believe I’ve survived the moments leading up to now. Everything is different, we moved to LA and I started working, so I’ve had some pretty big distractions. I miss you and it hurts just as much today. I was thinking today about the moment when I had to give you away to the arms of my nurse. That was when I was being discharged from the hospital, we kept you with us until the very last second. I’m so glad we did, that time we had is something I cherish and always will. For other people who have gone through this, how could they not hold and cradle their babies? I just don’t understand when I read stories of parents not wanting to hold their babies or take pictures. I guess grief and trauma do some crazy things to a person’s psyche, and those parents most likely regret that, which is horrible to think about. I don’t have much, so I hold onto the things we did right with you, and I am grateful for the time we had with you.

We are going to honor you on your due date in the most sacred way possible. We are going to marry each other on that day. Privately, no guests, nobody has even been told of our plans. That day is only about us, and you, our beautiful little family. We will exchange personally written vows at a city court house that day, or maybe later on the beach, we haven’t decided that yet. We will take photographs later on the beach at sunset so that we have something tangible to remember that day with. And then we will celebrate our love for you and for each other over dinner at one of the most romantic restaurants in LA.

We want you to know that our love is stronger for having created your brief life. There was nothing easy about my pregnancy with you, and certainly nothing easy in the days and weeks following your death, but the pain we’ve experienced has brought us closer together and we are so ready to make the ultimate commitment in your honor.

Please come down from Heaven to us that day. Please give a sign on that day that you are there with us, watching over us. Let me feel your presence. Wrap your warm angel wings around us and bless us with your presence in any possibly way. That day is going to be so hard, but so beautiful, just like the day I delivered you sleeping. I will need to know that you are with us. I want us to always celebrate our wedding anniversary in a way that is intertwined with our memories of you, and now, I will always get to do that. I feel so lucky that I will get to celebrate my two greatest loves together on one day.

Anniversaries for us will not just be remembered as some weekend day when a trendy wedding venue had an opening and we spent thousands of dollars trying to make it special by inviting a whole bunch of people and their dates watch us get married, and then spending all our money trying to feed them, get them drunk, entertain them with music that half of them hate, and decorate it in such a way to convince people that yes, this wedding really is special, look how we used purple flowers and silver china. We’ve both already had that type of wedding, and it’s not what we want as we celebrate our love for each other. Our wedding day will only be about us, the three of us. We are a family struck by tragedy, but we are mending one day at a time and learning how to love in the deepest way that anyone could ever know. I’ve come to realize that we won’t ever fully mend, we’ll just go on living and loving and pain just going to be a big part of it, but maybe not always the heaviest part.