Two Years. Two Angel Babies.

I want to talk about it. But I don’t.  But I do.    Two years ago today my twin girls went to heaven on the day they were born.  It still feels like it was yesterday.  It still does not feel real.

There are so many things that run through my head when I think of Charlotte and Grace.  How soft their white blankets were.  The lullabies I sang them, the ones I can not sing to Lily.  The level of pain when I had to put “mother” as the relationship to the deceased on paperwork. The songs we picked out for the funeral and how upset I get when I hear any of them now.  How small their coffins were.  It just keeps going.

I have had countless sessions with my bereavement therapist trying to work through all of these feelings, thoughts, memories, and the overwhelming loss.  Two years later it is still incredibly raw but there are three key things my therapist said that I repeat to myself.

We are now a family of three but also a family of five.

Babies do not replace babies.

Bad moms do not worry about being bad moms.

I think of at least one of these phrases almost as often as I think about my baby girls.  I know they are in heaven and looking down on Mark, Lily, and I but we still wish more than anything they were here.   It is also very odd that since moving to New York and starting a new job at a new company that the vast majority of people I interact with on a daily basis have no idea.   They don’t know I was pregnant with twins.  They don’t know about my first two daughters.  They don’t know about this life changing event that forever changed who I am as a person. It is a strange topic to bring up and some days I can not imagine talking about on other days I want people to know.  I want them to be remembered by more than Mark and I.  And yet there is a line, I have hundreds of photos of my babies but the one above is the only one we feel comfortable sharing.  Something are private and will stay private.

Today we both took off of work and spent the day remembering our babies in different ways.  Something I have not publicly shared – after their funeral Charlotte and Grace were cremated and the following weekend we drove down to the South Coast of England.  There is a spot Mark grew up going to, a gorgeous scenic location near Christchurch, and we spread their ashes in the ocean.  We did not want our baby girls to be in just one spot, they are in the entire ocean so now whenever we are by the sea they are there with us.   To be with them in our own way we biked around the majority of the island of Manhattan this morning taking in the water the whole time and then in the afternoon also walked down to the water which flows into the sea to just be.

Baby girls, I miss you more than you will ever know.