Sammy's Heaven Day

Yesterday, July 22, we celebrated what Camille has come to call "Blue Balloon Day," otherwise known as Sam's Happy Heaven Day.

Bill and I have known since Sam and Hannah died in the NICU 8 years ago that we would never stop honoring their life on this earth and the special place that they hold in our family's history and in our memories and hearts.  For people peering in from the outside, their lives were excruciatingly brief, a drop in the bucket which gets more diluted as time goes on.  However, NICU life runs on a different clock. 

The ten days of Sam's life and the 24 of Hannah's seemed like numerous months, where we spent minute after minute and hour after hour at their incubator-sides, waiting intently as we got updates on their progress, talked incessantly to them, prayed, read a bunch of great books, prayed, "contained" them with our hands through the circular doors into their "spaceships," prayed, and came to know the staff like a second family.  One day alone could seem like years as we were hit with varying degrees of stability in the course of 24 hours... celebrations of improvement in lung function in the morning and increased feedings of breastmilk via NG tube by noon, only to be balanced out by signs of fever and a severe infections or even code blues by nightfall.  Never have we grieved so many little things and celebrated so many milestones in such a short amout of time, the climax of which was grieving their losses on earth while celebrating their entrances to heaven.  Never have we been forced to grow so much so quickly.  Sam and Hannah's lives changed us forever; they made us better parents and better people.  So....we owe it to them to remember them and thank them. Our lives would be profoundly different had they not been in it.

For a few years when Camille was little, we released balloons to them on their birthday, July 12.  A couple of years back, Bill and I decided that we didn't want Camille's birthday to be about honoring Sam and Hannah; we wanted to let her birthday be about her as an individual.  We decided instead to celebrate their heaven days, making it a celebration of their life here and the beautiful days they left this world, a place which proved to be too harsh for them. 

While obviously I think about them much during this time, we cetainly don't make a day of of it with the kids.  We usually take about 5 minutes to release balloons, watching them float away across the horizon.  The kids do know what the ballons are for and who they are for; we don't hide Sam and Hannah's existence.  We do mention them fondly, and like to think that they are present in our lives.  However, in our everyday life, they are not mentioned every day, sometimes not even monthly.

That is why I guess I was a bit taken by surprise this year when the following came home from school.  Camille's class was doing a unit on holidays:
















She holds them in her heart, and every once in awhile, it comes out when we least expect it.

I wonder about the mystery of multiple births, if the time in utero spent together bonds the babies in any special way.  I have heard stories of such. 

Someday, I will ask her.