Dear Audrey,

Oh God. You'd be 10 this year. I know if you were still here, we'd have had a hell of a party. Pony Rides, Petting Zoo, moon bouncers, Snow Cones, you name it. NEVER was anything better than celebrating your birthday.
I miss you so much, and yet I know you'd find me happy. It's a good thing we moved here, your presence here is only in what I put out of yours. (Your urn is on the mantle, and I can't bring myself to put out all my pictures yet.) It hurts and feels good to be here at the same time. I know you'd approve. The people here are kinder, and seem more caring. Your little brother will start school this fall, and it was confusing for me. When you started you were only 3, and it seems I met with at least 10 different people regarding your IEP (Individualized Education Plan). It was so much easier with you than it is with him. You had 5 kids in your class, and were given every consideration. He will be lost among 20 some odd other kids, trying to make an impression. He doesn't remember you, and it kills me. He has a vague recollection of you on a school bus, but now associates you with outer space. (I told him once that heaven was between the earth and the stars, and I guess that's what he made of where you are.)
I talk to parents of "normal" kids all the time, and they make it seem so easy. For me, it's hard. When you were here, it WAS easy. I knew how to fight to get what you needed. I knew what to do, I don't know what to do with your brother. He's "normal", he doesn't require an advocate. He can speak for himself. I never imagined that it would be so difficult to raise a child. You were so easy to take care of. Everyone always assumes that it's so difficult to care for a child with special needs, but it really isn't. Especially if they are your first, like you were. You were all I knew.
Everyday was very much the same. Get up, turn the feeding pump off. Get the meds ready. Change your diaper. Get you to pick out what you were going to wear that day, well some days, not all. You were the best dressed girl in your school, everyone gave you great clothes. Ok, meds are dissolved in the syringe, get them in your tummy, flush with water. At least 60 cc's. Finish getting you dressed, get you in your wheelchair, which you detested. Try and brush your hair, get it in a pony tail. Find your shoes, sign the papers from the day before that detailed what you did all day. Open the front door, roll you down the freshly poured concrete wheelchair ramp at the front door, and down to the end of the driveway. Bus waiting, kiss you good bye, watch the driver load you onto the lift, strap you down, call "I love You, have a good day at school baby..." Back inside.
Oh god, how I wish I could go back to that existence everyday. You would be so much bigger by now, I wonder if you'd've gotten a new wheelchair. I wonder if you'd've been able to master enough motor control to have an electric wheelchair. That Baclofen pump would have done wonders for you. I never would have regretted putting you through both the surgeries for nothing. It would've worked, and given you some small measure of control. Would you eventually been able to speak? Would you eventually been able to manage an easier existence? I wish I had never done it. I wish that I had made different choices. I wish that you were still here. I wish I had taken your place. When is it ever going to end? Will I see you then, at the end? Will you be waiting for me like everyone always tells me you are? Dancing, and singing in the brightness that is supposedly "heaven". Or will it be darkness?
I struggle now to keep up the front that I present to people. This birthday is hitting me especially hard. Ten years old. A major milestone for kids. I took the day off work for it, and I don't know what to do. Daddy has to work, and it'll just be me and your brother at home all day. Someone at work told me to go to the zoo, but I don't think I'll be able to. I just want to be here, maybe pull out your pillow, which still smells like you. I want to mourn for the birthdays you will never have. The milestones you will never reach. I want to scream to the heavens to take me to you, or to bring you back to me. I want to wake up tomorrow, on your birthday, and pretend that the last 34 months have been a nightmare. I want to wake up tomorrow and not remember the day you died because it never really happened. I want to see you again, hear you laugh, hear you cry. Get you on the bus, sit with you through PT, OT, Speech, and Music therapies. Brush your hair, dress you, get you ready for your party. Spend hours agonizing over what to get you, because you already have everything. I want the little things back. All of them, one of them. How am I ever going to manage for the rest of my life without you? Every event will be marked by your absence.
I miss you so much. Someday I'll be with you again. I hope anyway, I'm still not really sure about this whole "god" thing anymore. Any God who could take you from me, well, I'm not sure I'd like to go to that heaven, unless you were there.
I love you Audrey,
Happy Birthday baby.
Mommy