I used to go on walks at the park with a mommy friend of mine. We’d stroll with our babies strapped to our chests and catch up on each others lives. Talk about the hard parts of being a mom, and the amazing parts, too. She’d talk about what her son was doing (learning to crawl) and I’d wonder when my daughter would reach that stage.  She was just a little thing then,  I knew it would still be a few months.  

What I didn’t know was that it wouldn’t happen at all.  

My daughter, Reason Rayne passed away 4 months and 21 days after we welcomed her with open arms and open hearts into our lives.  

She would be nearly 22 months old and now I feel I don’t belong at parks.

Now the playground swings and jungle gyms are painful reminders that my baby girl was, and never will be, old enough to enjoy them.  I never heard her sweet laugh while she felt the wind through her hair as she pumped her little legs and swung higher and faster. I never got to kiss her scraped knees from jumping off the swing when it was still flying just a little too high.  I never had the chance to coax her down the slide and catch her when she reached the bottom. She never showed me how she could walk up it all by herself, or The first time she introduced herself to a potential playmate.

Playgrounds lay out so many the firsts that were never a part of Reason’s story.  I see kids her age and think maybe Reason would have liked them.  

Maybe they would have been friends and I’d be planning play dates with their mom instead of wishing desperately that I wasn’t there, watching with a jealous heart, the family that could have been mine if only things had been different.

Lately, instead of parks, I find myself walking in cemeteries.  My daughter wasn’t buried so I’m not there to see her. I am there to seek out the baby graves, read the names, connect on the smallest scale to families that have walked and those who continue to walk this journey. Most of all I’m there to cry. Among the graves sadness is expected, I don’t have to worry about pretending to be happy. I can embrace the heaving sobs that well up in my belly. My tears can mix with the tears of those before me,  those with the same broken mother heart.  

I can bend down close to read the headstones, get to know these children through the words their parents have chosen to memorialize them. These tiny tombstones are the closest thing my daughter will have friends now. The children that never grew up here on earth.  Some of their stones have been worn so badly by time and weather you can barely make them out at all. Some of them have been buried without names, “Baby boy (Insert surname here)” “The infant daughter of X and Y Smith”. At first I didn’t know what to think of these nameless children and I cried for them and for me and every child no longer counted among the living. I began to understand that even without a name these babies are loved, cherished and always remembered.  I have come across infant tombs over thirty years old, fresh flowers adorning the graves.  Thirty years of bringing flowers to a baby that never made it home from the hospital. So missed and so loved.

One grave that screamed out to me was rather recent. A little girl the world lost just last year, a child nearly the same age Reason was when we lost her. There was no headstone at her grave just a small marker and an Easter basket. Her first Easter basket lovingly crafted but to go unopened,  trinkets that would never be played with, eggs never hunted.

That’s where I feel I belong: among the lost holidays and missing years.  I wonder if those parents too wander aimlessly through strange cemeteries. Feeling the same pull toward the land of the dead, rejecting the world of the living just for a while.  Transfixed and transposed in a place none of us imagined we would be.  Taking steps everyday to move forward but never leaving their children behind.

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Savannah Rose Hannum is the proud mother of Reason Rayne Hannum. She currently lives in Florida with her husband Frank and their dog Chewbacca. She focuses on working to navigate life as a still mother, one day at a time. She blogs at The Loss of Reason.