BY BLYTH LORD

Today is Hump Day in Cameron Week. Cameron Week refers to the five days in May between my daughter Cameron’s birthday – May 4, 1999 – and the day she died – May 9, 2001. Much like spring in New England where we live, Cameron Week sneaks up on us. One minute we’re going about our business as a family of four, and then Wham! we are intensely reminded that we are a family of five with a hole in the middle. Cameron would be 15 this week, but my husband Charlie and I and our daughters Taylor (17) and Eliza (13) agree that she will always be a beautiful and precious 2-year old to us.

I was having lunch with one of Courageous Parents Network’s amazing advisors yesterday and she asked me how we handle Cameron Week. I told her that this year we celebrated her birthday by eating a delicious chocolate cake at dinner (an exceptional treat as I never bake). We went around the table and each said something about Cameron. I went last but when it got to me, I couldn’t speak. I was crying and there were no words. My longing for Cameron’s physical being overwhelmed me and I was undone. Any parent whose child has died knows this undoing: the painful desire to touch one’s child again and knowing that it is one of the few things in this world that Can Not Happen Ever Again. The impossibility of this can make me feel a little crazy. Indeed, I can see how grief could turn a person mad. Thus, I have learned not to pay much attention to this piece of it – to push the longing aside when it starts to rear its head – because honestly there is absolutely Nothing To Be Done and a person can’t sit around all day crying for the impossible. But on Cameron’s birthday, with her photo sitting in the middle of the table, a piece of chocolate cake to my side, I couldn’t ignore it. It was staring at me, I stared back, and I wept.

The other thing I told this friend about Cameron Week is how perfectly situated I think it is. Cameron Week comes around in early May when spring arrives in New England and the glorious green leaf buds burst out on the trees. I remember taking a walk in the woods near our house a few days after her 2nd birthday and a few days before she died, when we knew she was in her last week, and finding the juxtaposition of spring coming while Cameron was leaving to be interesting. Interesting and fitting. As my first blog “Surrender” notes, when she was first diagnosed with her fatal disease, I couldn’t fathom how the natural world was proceeding as always, heedless of our tragedy. But now, 18-months later, I found Nature’s persistent optimism comforting. Spring is Nature’s most hopeful time of year and this hope was soothing to me. Our grief counselor had helped us understand that as Cameron’s body was shutting down, her spirit was getting bigger and bigger. Soon it would get so big it would leave her body and go mix with Nature’s energy. The notion that her energy would go into the universe and mix with the energy that brought us leaves and tulips and birdsong was a good notion.

Cameron Week 2014 is a little different for me in that it marks the one-year anniversary of my leaving my job in television production to found Courageous Parents Network. I have spent the last year meeting the most incredible parents and some of their children, listening to them, learning from them, admiring them. I spend my days talking with parents whose children are living with a fatal prognosis or have died, and I am nourished by their stories and their wisdom. Given all of this, I was a little surprised by how hard I cried on Cameron’s birthday this past Sunday, (and who knows how I will be this coming Friday when we recognize the anniversary of her death). I witness other parents’ grief every day. But this year, Cameron Week has reminded me that I am first and foremost a mom who really misses her daughter.

God bless you Cameron.