The knock at the door

Many weeks ago I read this post on another bloggers site, it really struck a chord. So I'm doing what I rarely have done in the 2 years posting... I'm talking about someone else's post.

Writing this post is a way of sort of letting a bit of the subject matter "go". To get it out of me, to exhale so I have the room to take in a new, more peaceful, long breath.

The topic was (survivor) guilt. It could easily apply to so many things. So many ways to interpret the topic.

Surviving a spouse.
Surviving a parent.
Surviving your child.
Surviving your best friend.
Surviving your sibling.
Your child surviving the loss of their birth family.

And thus began the fresh, crisp clarity in my head, like bells ringing from a church tower on a clear day. Survivor guilt.

I actually get that concept. Just like the many interpretations, there are also many ways in which it can show itself. One type of survivor guilt that may not be easy to understand is the loss of a child, or likewise the loss of your children's birth parents.

And this made me really think as I read his post. And it dawned on me that perhaps a few people in our lives experienced survivor guilt when Sophia died. ... maybe their family came easy... maybe they wished they could have done more before we lost her... maybe words or deeds spoken or acted upon in less than gentle ways echoed in their heads. Perhaps they, like us, were drowning in a sea, for no clear reason, of Survivor Guilt.

yeah, I know, perhaps it's true... then again maybe this is all just a bunch of shitty meaningless theories and I give more credit than due.

I remember driving to the hospital that night, drowning in a sea of survivor guilt, I was alive and she was dead. I remember insisting something just wasn't right for many weeks... Survivor Guilt, I still to this day feel I didn't do enough. I wished everything in our life away, the house, the car, the dogs, everything we had that night, just to turn back the hands of time.

But over the last two years we continued to survive, sometimes finding joy and laughter and yet, there were times I cringed at my happiness.

How could I be happy when we lost her? How could life move on and be so callous? How selfish of us to laugh and learn to enjoy life again when she never took a single breath. I still struggle with that guilt today. It's lessened, but it will never leave, I am convinced. It's taught a valuable lesson about guilt and what it can do to a person.

And then I think of Magpie.

For what it's worth, losing Sophia will prepare us for bringing Magpie into our home. We will, over time, help her to face the loss of her birthparents. But there will be times we'll wonder "how can we be happy when another family had to suffer to allow ours to be created"? How can we be sincere in our joy without feeling sadness at the lack of joy for someone else.

How is it possible to fulfill your own life, your own family through someone elses vacuum? how will Magpie survive these thoughts? How might she feel if one day, when we return to China, she sees the life of the children who never found a home, who spent their life very differently from her? A guilt she might feel all her own.

There are all kinds of guilts in this world, some we create in our own lives, some life just creates for us. For Magpie, we will struggle along side her to come to terms with the reality of what we know of her early life. It will be those times that we will find it difficult to enjoy our own happiness as a family. We will never be able to fill the void of the parents who bring her life, but I hope with every fiber of our being that we give her every ounce of love and happiness a child deserves in this world.

I hope those things will help her through the dark voids she may at times feel and I hope that Survivor Guilt never comes knocking on her door.