Bittersweet

**one of my last pregnancy pictures taken the morning we left for the hospital**





Everything is so mixed up right now, I don't even know what to say. I feel such overwhelming gratitude to everyone for all your prayers. Really. In my entire life, I have never felt such love and care or sense of "community", for lack of a better word, as I do now. I kinda feel like I owe it to ya'll to at least say something. So this is my feeble attempt at (yet another) update.

I realize you might be wondering, but I'll have to be brief about this part. The delivery was....traumatic. I just can't think of a more appropriate word to use. It was...uh...very different from a "normal" delivery. There definitely was God's grace in certain respects {relatively painless comparatively & I praise Him for that}, but in other respects, I couldn't find Him there. The details of what happened are perhaps things that no one ever talks about. Things that even "they" don't want to tell you, so that you won't be freaked out beyond belief. I wish I were more prepared. Then again, I don't even know that there is any amount of preparation that could cover a delivery like what I experienced. I really need prayer that I will actually forget certain things. Please pray that God has mercy on my memories.

As for this moment, we are home now. It is quiet here & I am resting. Other than a backache, which I am going to care for shortly, I am not in any physical pain. We have plenty of food, as we went on huge grocery run on Monday {God must've known I needed to stock up}. Thanks to several angels, our house is clean. I mean, white-glove clean. I don't know what I've done to deserve such amazing friends.

We are preparing for a private burial tomorrow, which I know will be bittersweet. This might not make sense to some of you, but I am mostly feeling a sense of relief. Just relief that this leg of our journey is over, even if I did not end as I so fervently prayed that it would. I can not accurately describe the emotional agony that we had experienced over the last several weeks, so to have that specific chapter come to an end is just....relieving. It has been replaced with a sadness and pain that is altogether different. But like I keep telling others, I am just grieving for myself and my family and what we have lost, not actually for Olivia, if you can gather that.

As I was being wheeled through the hospital to leave, I was crying to myself that I am leaving this place without being able to bring Olivia home. And in that moment I distinctly felt Him say...


...She already is.


Thanking Him for all of You~