Heaven Day

For Ryan's fourth Heaven Day we kept up our tradition of writing balloon messages to send to him in Heaven along with eating donuts (halos) in remembrance of our angel. Below is Jonathon's sweet writing, he wrote I love you Ryan with a halo he drew over his name and he tried to write the date, 8-24-12 :) It was a beautiful evening and the boys swam in Grandma's pool. They enjoy this tradition of writing to their brother and then watching their messages float up and away into the sky. It was a very peaceful evening and we had to keep Caleb from eating all of the donuts. Uncle Chris was nice enough to put a little piece of donut on one of the balloons strings so Ryan would get some lol.

A little humor was good for me after thinking of his passing day and how it all happened. Flashbacks tortured me all day randomly: the nurse bringing him to us after all of his life sustaining tubes were taken off, holding him skin to skin, hearing his first and last little noise he made, the feeling when the nurse came in and said his heart had stopped, holding him for hours and not knowing how I would ever let him go, passing his sweet body around for family and close friends to hold, leaving the hospital the next day empty handed in a wheel chair without him, hearing the family plan the funeral around me as I could not handle it the next several days, then thinking of his funeral and how beautiful he looked as I got to hold him one last time, the way it felt kissing his cold little nose and eyelids and little mouth, the tears that flowed as Jake and I placed him in his casket and fixed his little white suit, the tragedy when they sealed the casket and knowing that was our final good-bye for a long time, the horror of seeing his tiny casket lowered into the ground, Jake's arms around me as we sat there alone staring at the grave site covered up with dirt, then driving home and knowing that was it, it was all over, and I would have to somehow deal with it and learn how to grieve.

Looking back four years later we have come a LONG way. We still miss him as intensely as we did then, but we have just as much peace to counter it and hope for the day when we will see him again. We feel blessed to have an angel watching over us and to be a forever family, not a 'til death do you part family.