5 years ago...

Do you know where you were five years ago this minute? Do you know what you were feeling? thinking? Can you feel it? See it? Smell it? I can. These are the hours that changed my life forever. This was a moment that defined me to the core. A memory that holds me in place for all of time.

There aren't many things that can hold you the way this day holds me. There aren't many memories that can capture you for a lifetime. Losing a child, that is a moment that never leaves. The moment never goes gray in your memory files. Now I am sure there are specifics that have left me in five years. There may even be some facts that have distorted, but I am pretty sure time stood still more than once that night.

I am beyond blessed that I didn't sit in that room alone. Not a member of my family went to sleep that night. Our best friends slept on hospital floors. They too were being changed forever.

I have said many, many times, but it is the moment I can't forget, the moment I most wish I had caught on a camera, so I could hold it outside of my head. It's the time that I spent with my baby boy curled in my arms and I was falling apart. There was nothing left in me, but in those moments, my baby boy held his little hand wrapped around my finger. The little fist that he almost never opened, that night held me close.

To start at the beginning of this part of our story. To tell the whole story from this hospital stay, I have to go back a few days.

December 1, we had spent until well into the wee hours of the day stringing Christmas lights, watching Christmas specials, taking pictures, never knowing this was our last night at home with our baby boy.

We had been at the hospital the week before, but we had come home and were so hopeful that things were getting back to normal. We were worried about Christmas cards and lights. We were busy with the season. We wanted baby boy to have the best first Christmas. We never thought he would never have a first Christmas.

After everyone left things took a turn so fast that looking back you question how you should have known something sooner, you should have strung less lights, worried less about how the Christmas card was going to look. There was no way to know how fleeting our moments were. Things took a turn so fast that none of our parents had even reached their homes before turning back around to our house as they received frantic calls from us.

My husband is one of the few people in this world that has actually had to save another person's life. I mean there are many of us that learn ways to save and protect others, but as a lifeguard for many years, he hadn't just taught life saving classes, he had at one point pulled a man from a pool and administered life saving CPR. Once in a lifetime that is an overwhelming task, but that night he had to administer those same life saving skills that had saved a man he didn't know, and he had to use them to save our child. His first born son was lying their needing his daddy to save his life. He stayed so calm, there was nothing calming in my nature that evening, in my mind I remember being a mess, so I don't even want to imagine what the reality of how out of it I was.

I can tell you that we did leave the house via an ambulance and that I didn't know if when we gave our son over to the paramedics if we would ever hold him alive again on this Earth. I didn't think that we would make it to the hospital. Then at the hospital, we got out of the ambulance and the paramedics still were giving him a chance. Another whirl of foggy comes over me and I remember standing outside the glass sliding doors as the woman ER doctor asked us questions and tried many things. There were SO MANY doctors and nurses surrounding our little boy that I wasn't sure if he was really even in the middle of this loud, chaotic motion that was happening in front of me.

This lady (I am sure she is an outstanding woman and doctor, I mean you would have to be to work in a Children's Hospital Emergency Room...but in that evening, she was "this lady") tells us that she is going to have to put him on a ventilator. I lose it all over again....not that I really pulled it together to lose again, but I never believed that Will's very weak bones could survive the procedure involved to put him on a ventilator. I truly believed in that moment that this doctor had just looked at me and told me that she was going to step inside this room 2 feet away from me and kill my son while I watched. That is what I heard in that moment.

She comes out...I have no idea what the actual time that passed was at that point...and gives me an update. I have NO IDEA what she said. I was in so much shock that my little boy was still alive that I heard no words that anyone spoke to me at that point.

We were eventually moved out of the ER and taken to the PICU. The exhaustion at this point makes things very patchy...maybe one day we can get Jason to write down what was actually happening, because God has gifted him with a much sharper memory of the timeline from here. I do remember learning that in the PICU only one person could sleep at a time. So if both Jason and I were going to stay with Will, which there wasn't anything that could have taken either of us out of that room, I almost had them bring me a bed pan it got so bad (I didn't change out of the clothes that had on December 1 at our house until after we made funeral arrangements late afternoon  on December 4) one of us had to stay awake. Will never slept much and with this vent in his throat that he wouldn't leave alone, there was no sleeping for him anyways, so we took turns sitting beside his bed talking to him and reading to him. Those big eyes were so very tired. They looked at me with so many questions as he was way too young to know what had just happened to him and where he was.

Within about 24 hours of being on the vent, he was breathing stronger and the vent wasn't needed. That is when the meetings started. That is when we were asked to step away from his bedside. That is when I sat in a room feeling my world yet again falling apart. We were being talked to about a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate). We were being told that once the vent came off, he wouldn't be strong enough to have it put in again. We were being told that if another spell happened like what we just had had happen we would have to say goodbye to our son. These conversations are hard to even think about and still the source of so many questions and what-if's for me and Jason, but as I have said before, I have to find peace in the fact that my God had a plan for my baby boy bigger than any decision I made sitting in a conference room with a bunch of doctors.

The vent came out. Hopes were still on the rise. We had no idea what the lasting impact of the last few days would be in his life, but we still never believed that his life was coming to an end. Maybe we were in denial, maybe we were being naïve, but we were still full of hope. I can still picture looking out our window and seeing all of our family and friends in the waiting room. I didn't want to leave my seat next to Will, but I remember the waves of support and the prayers that I saw for us through that window.

I don't remember the exact moment that we knew that we had entered the beginning of the end. I know that late on the 3rd/ early on the 4th the end had come. The looks from the hospital staff that came through our room that night were grim. Our nurse had been with us for most of the time that we had been in the PICU this trip and he was amazing. When the hours came to say goodbye, I remember him coming in and turning off all the stupid machines that beeped in our room. He said that he could monitor what he needed to in the hall and that we didn't need to be staring at a screen and having a constant beeping giving us the play-by-play of our last moments together.

Again, Will fought. Even after those machines were turned off and the family piled in the room, we were gifted hours, not minutes as the staff had prepared us for. He fought. His whole life, he fought. In the last moments, I remember Jason telling him it was okay that he didn't have to fight anymore as he stared into his daddy's eyes. I still, as his mother, yearn to be the one that felt the pain, I yearn to be the one that had to fight that fight instead of having to watch my child endure the pain. I am his mother, it is instinctual to want to protect them and make their life pain-free.

So today is the anniversary of the day that he held my hand that last time. Today is the day that I am most jealous of the angels who sit next to my son. Today is the day that I live in that hospital recliner chair in the PICU holding my little boy.

Today is the day that changed me forever.

Each day of our past molds us into who we are, and it isn't often that we are changed by sudden, sharp indentations in our soul, but on this date that is exactly what happened to me. Now I am challenged with taking that scar and the days that I have left and making the most of it for God's glory. Making my child's short time on this Earth make an impact that far exceeds the time that he was blessed with.