I am just so desperate to hold and talk to Jud. Everything in my being aches and longs for him. I would give anything to simply have another moment or two to cradle even his most broken body in my embrace, or talk with him even when he was mute and could not respond.
It is as though my body and soul are hungry, actually starving for Judson, and yet there is no way to satisfy my frantic cravings.
Our friend Mark sent us, and a few other friends, this email awhile ago and it resonated so strongly with my longings:
God built into us this beautiful capacity to connect to each other, with familial connections being the strongest. I’ve studied the brain a bit, and it’s amazing how we are hard wired to emotionally attach…The bond between parent and child? Wow. Amazing.
We are talking about deeply integrated neuronal connections between a mother and child, father and child, that sympathetically resonate with each other. The baby coos and the mother responds instinctively. If we scan their brains we can see the actual resonations. Today we understand that these resonations are literally building and reinforcing neural pathways, strengthening them. Parent and child are one in a mystical bond that God designed, all for the sake of the child’s well-being and parental connection.
But what happens to these powerful neural pathways when a child dies? All those associated with physical caretaking have to die too. This is why Drake and Christina sit in a grief they cannot name. Their hands, that were so used to nurturing Judson, are now confused trying to find a child that isn’t physically there. As a result they sit in emotional pain like no other.
So as I lay in the bean bag chair in Judson’s room, amongst his toys and books, with an empty embrace, wishing I could go back and hold my beautiful boy just a little longer, I am reminded that I could never have satiated myself enough with Jud, while he was alive, to curb the voracious appetite for connection that is now ever-present in my life-forever unsatisfied this side of heaven.