Day 1-Songs

Day 1 - a song that reminds you of your child, or one that you can't listen to anymore and why.

When Stella was first admitted into the NICU we didn't stay overnight with her. We believed she was going to get better so we had better go home at night and make sure we ate and slept and stayed sane. One of the nights we went home R decided to play a little bit on his banjo-uke and I recorded it. The nurses told us Stella could hear and it would be nice for her to listen to music. It's only a 30-second snippet of some picking and strumming but it is seered in my brain. We played it for her over and over believing she could hear it and was comforted by a sound she heard a lot when she was still in the womb.

When we found out the extent of Stella's brain injury and learned that off life support there was no knowing how long she would live, we did not leave the hospital. We weren't prepared to stay but we did anyway. R and I wore the same clothes for 3 days straight until his dad came to visit and drove home with R to pick up a change of clothes and some things to make our stay in the hospital more comfortable. We had no clue how long we would be. One thing R brought back was the laptop thinking we could get online. Wishful thinking but we did have a lot of music to listen to quietly. R played for Stella a couple songs we put on our wedding CD (our wedding favors were CDs we made with our special songs): Tom Waits' Picture in a Frame and Bruce Cockburn's Love Song.

Those songs will forever bring me back to that room with her in my arms and I'm crying and crying because the time was so short.

From "Love Song":

In the place my wonder comes from
There I find you