Saturday, February 9, 2008

Sabrina


Everybody asks us, "How's Sabrina doing?" We think she's coping quite well, considering the year she's had. She went from being an only child for 4 years, to having an enormously pregnant mom who couldn't play with her, to moving to a new house, to having two new babies in the family, to starting French immersion kindergarten, to seeing her brother go to Children's Hospital and not coming home, to hardly ever seeing mom because she's always at the hospital, to seeing her sister go to Children's Hospital and not coming home, and back to being the only child in the house again. Whew.

Sabrina grieves for Nicholas and Olivia. Oh, she loved those babies! They were her babies, you could hardly keep her from them. We always had to tell her to back up, or she would have smothered them with her love. Sabrina had always wanted a brother and a sister. We would ask her when she was smaller if she wanted a brother or a sister, and she always answered that she wanted a brother and a sister.

Thank God for the short attention span of a 5 year old. When she wants to talk about Nicholas and Olivia, we do, and we cry sometimes. But it doesn't last long, and she's moved on to having adventures and tearing up the living room. We've always been honest with her about what happened. She knows more about death than a 5 year old child should. But she also knows about Heaven too.

The three of us are very close now. Even closer than we were. Now that things are settling down into the routine of our new "normal", we have been seeing our little Sabrina again instead of the angry whirlwind of emotion and defiance that had been what we were living with while our gentle babies were dying. I thank God for Sabrina. What a beautiful, little bright spot of joy she is!

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