Family faced with life after son’s death
“After everything is over, it really starts to sink in. Then everybody forgets about you. They forget that your baby died. And that’s when it’s really hard. People just kind of move on. Obviously, your loved ones care. But there’s this pain that’s just yours.
“At some point you’re faced with deciding, what are you going to do now that you’ve lost a child? Are you going to live differently? We went through this existential crisis. How is it going to affect how we live now? How are we going to proceed with our lives? And how are we going to honor Oliver’s memory? One year later, those are things we’re still working on. Right now, I still don’t have a good answer.
“I guess if we learned anything from this whole experience, it’s that we are healthy and we don’t have anything to complain about. So why not choose to be happy? I mean, what good does it do to just sulk and sit in a corner and cry? It does me no good to just sit here and think about the baby I lost, if I have these two other babies who are being ignored by their parents.
“On a tough day at work, we may come home and just crash on the couch and watch TV. But then these other babies who are here, alive and healthy, what are we doing for them? So we’ve been trying to do more activities together as a family. We’re trying to give them the best life possible. That doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten about Oliver. That will never happen.
“I’m just thankful that on a few of Oliver’s rare good days in the hospital, Archer got to hold him. He would touch him and caress him and kiss him. And when Oliver was dying, when he was in really bad shape, they finally let Judah in to see him. Obviously, it was not the Oliver that I wanted him to meet, when he was really swollen and hooked up to all these machines. But at least we did get to introduce him to Oliver, and he did get to interact with him.
“So they both know they had a baby brother. As we move into the future and they grow up, that’s something I don’t want them ever to forget.”
— Marilyn Heredia
Oliver was born on March 20, 2019. He passed away on June 14, 2019.
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