Death in the family, warning, this is sad.

I haven't been home, or posting. We've had a death in the family.

We've had them before, grandparents usually, and the heartbreaking loss of both of my husband's parents. Sometimes it was one of our aunts or uncles.  In fact, on this very day, my side of the family is meeting to memorialize my dad's cousin. Once it was my husband's 18 year old sister, and we thought we'd never recover from the loss of such a young person.

This time it is an even younger person, a baby. Matthew Zane Gray was born on March 7th, and he died on March 7th. He was ten pounds nearly even, with a full head of hair and absolutely nothing wrong with him.My brother-in-law and his wife are suffering the loss of a full term baby, and we're suffering with them. Oddly enough, when you look at infant mortality, that this is the first birthed baby in our large family to pass away. There have been several miscarriages, and my own late term losses offered tiny bodies to bury. But never before have we been able to fill our arms with the beauty of new life, while mourning the loss of family.

My friend Ren has started letters to the dead on her blog. I was full of emotion when i first saw it, because I have yet to full grieve the loss of my own Abigail, Matthew, and Asher...as well as our first loss, John Wallace.  Her blog stirred feelings in me that I was trying to suppress (oh yeah, that's healthy)  I'm still angry/sad/mad/whatever about losses that happened when I was five.....thirty years of ignoring pain. That's how our family rolls apparently, because no one talks about bad things.

It sucks. There's no other way to put it without reducing myself to primal screams and violence. I was able to cry with my sister, to share the pain of our losses, and that helped. I was able to rock his not-so-tiny body, brush his black hair. We watched as his tiny coffin was laid to rest, and wondered about the purpose of his life.