Sarah had the usual infant’s separation anxiety. I remember when we introduced her to her Uncle Jeff at about six months, and he picked her up from my arms, she began crying to go back to me. I found it very gratifying that she was so attached to us.
But now I feel like the one with separation anxiety. Time to get over it. Time to stop wallowing around being anxious and depressed. Okay, Sarah is dead. She took a dirt nap. That’s a fact. She lived to be sixteen, which several people informed me was a long life span for a child with such complex disabilities. So job well done. All this guilt and self-flagellation is just not productive. Time to start rising above and letting go. I’m boring myself. The curtain has to come down on this phase of my grieving process.
I’m trying to remember that Sarah was a teenager when she died, a fairly grown-up young lady who actually did not want to spend all her time interacting with her parents. She ignored me many times in favor of Minecraft. She was not a tiny infant and she did not need me as much as she did when she was younger. She preferred to Facetime with her boyfriend Danny and she wanted to be with her friends. That’s natural.
Max has a scar on his lip, a faint one. When he was 2 or 3, his mother was getting ready to go out and apparently he had a bad attack of separation anxiety. He tried to run and follow her out of the house and he tripped and fell and cut his lip. His older brothers were supposed to be entertaining and distracting him but I guess they sort of failed or they didn’t realize he would react so strongly. But Max’s mom had a right to go out and do things on her own too. It’s not wrong to want a life of your own independent of your child and to build one.
The First Year Without Sarah 