8 months and 15 days later, more phone calls than I can count. Emails back and forth to 2 different Monument Companies. Countless phone calls to Calvary Cemetery and Blessed Sacrament Church and it is in!!

I will not deny that it is gorgeous, it is exactly what I envisioned, it has Connor’s beloved baseballs on it. It embodies everything that he was, and everything that his memory will hold for me forever.

But I also can’t deny that it caused a flood of tears that weren’t entirely unexpected. It was a finality a completion to the circle. It left me standing in front of the stone weeping and thinking my baby is under a big slab of granite, he is alone and cold. I know those are irrational thoughts, but those were what flooded my brain, and I couldn’t make them stop.

It felt like I was right back in November going through the desperation of his death all over again. No one ever said that the brain of a Grieving Mom is a rational one.

My rational brain will return, but for now, I have to start again, grief is a process, not a linear one. It is all over the place, like a tangled ball of yarn.