Walk a Day in my Shoes

This is for those people who look the other way when they see you coming, delete your comments on a post all because it makes them uncomfortable.  

Walk a day in my shoes.  One day you get a call your daughter has been hit and run over by a car.  One day you get a call to say she's aspirated and is in ICU on a ventilator.  The same day, she has been through 2 codes and goes through 6 more before you and your husband get to make the only decision you get to make and that's to stop lifesaving measures and let her go.

The next step is to call a funeral home to come get your daughter and transport her back to her hometown.  But wait, she has to go through an autopsy first and then you have to have a funeral home to embalm her before she can be transported across state lines.

Next step is to pick out something to bury her in.  You go back by your apartment that you and she shared to pick that up.  Something that you and her cousin had in mind.  After another 3 or more hours you reach home.  To grieve with those closest to you that will always be there.

The next 5 days you wait for your daughter to return home in a body bag.  In the meantime you plan where to bury her at.  Something that never crossed your mind.  When she arrives back, you find out that the summer dress you picked out for her will not work.  It doesn't cover the bruises and road burn on her arms.  She swollen and it doesn't fit.  But all they tell you is "we need something with long sleeves".  I know what the reasons are, I'm the last one to be with her when she was alert and alive.  I saw the black bruises on her face, chin and eye.  I saw the broken leg in a fixator, her crushed ankle along with her other broken bones.

The next thing you get to do is pick out a box for her as her resting place.  Pick out book for the guest to sign.  The next day you make yourself get up and put on a dress to attend her funeral.  All the while my sister is by my side telling me it's time and I have to go.

You get to the cemetery where every thing is set up.  This is the day that you get to sit on the front row.  It's known that the front row is for Don, me Vaughan, Emily and Sebastian.  Most everyone will get their own front row.  Hopefully all your children will be sitting next to you.

After the service your walk doesn't end.  It's just beginning.  For the rest of you life all your steps will be made without your daughter.

Later, you get the task of picking our a gravestone to cover the dirt that has been laid over your daughter's box.  The dried flowers are long gone.  It's just a pile of red clay.  It's hot.  You go through the motions deciding what is to be engraved into the stone.  It's more than you can take.

Several weeks later the call comes to say that it's complete.  You get to go view the perminent granite that will cover the dirt.

And now people think you can heal.  What people don't realize is that when you lose a child, you are never ok, there is no healing NEVER!!

No one will truly know everything I've been through in the last year.  I've had to push for what little justice I can get.  There will be no justice.  No justice for the doctors who didn't do their job.  No justice for the nurse, CNA, PT and OT who did not advocate for her.  No justice for the women who hit her, knocked her 10 yards, stayed in the same lane and ran over her.

I work in healthcare and there are triggers everywhere.  I choose to stay, because I will not be like those who turn their heads when they see me, Don, Vaughan and Emily.  I will not be the nurses, doctors, PT, OT who didn't stand up for her and for what was right.

So the next time you turn your head or delete my comments (made in all fairness), take one step in my shoes that I have walked in the past year.