Aimee Darby

Today was the perfect day to write; cloudy, chilly, melancholy and November. I wanted to write something inspired about how I feel 4 years 26 weeks and 5 days without my little girl. But I just stared out of the window willing myself to feel something different something new say something unsaid. November will always be sad. It will always be the culmination of days leading up to Elizas death and the days after. Their is no new word to describe it, no time machine to go back to the days that I long for, it all just stays, with the hope that a new picture or video might be recovered or a long forgotten memory will be remembered or that somehow seeing Eliza in my dreams will be enough.
Recently me and a friend decided to start a child loss group. Since she is new to this life I thought It would help her and I knew it would help me.
We invited a few mamas and we sat together and told our stories. The details were different but the experience was the same. The pain, the disbelief, the feeling that you don’t want to live another moment without them, that’s all still the same. I remember sitting at my first grief group just a few months after Eliza died and looking at the moms there and thinking “how are they not falling apart like me”.
I wanted someone to tell me what was going to happen to me. Was I really going to live? How was I going to ever think about Eliza without wanting to die? I needed to know but no one could tell me. They could only say “you just will.”
Every single morning since November 12, Eliza is the first thing I think of. In the first 3 or 4 years it was a desperate thought, like if you lose sight of your child on the playground. That panic that floods over you as you scream out their name and then you spot them and you can breathe. For me; for us, we can never breathe again.
But now when I wake up and think of E, it’s a little easier. The panic has subsided and sometimes I can even smile thinking of her sweet face. I wish I could tell you how it happened, how one day the room just stopped spinning but as hard as I’ve tried the only thing I know for sure is that those moms were right, with no explanation one day…you just will. 🤍