We all know that life is not fair, and that a father has to bury a child is perhaps one of the worst examples of it. That is what the Hammac have had to go through last October, when their five-day-old boy lost the battle he was fighting since he was born.
Ashlee Hammac, mother of the deceased baby, was broken by pain, but they realized that her 3-year-old son was having an equally bad time and found it very difficult to have to separate from his brother, so He placed a sandbox in the grave of his little son so that his older brother can play while visiting.
It happened last October 11, after a complicated end of pregnancy and an even worse birth gave birth to little Ryan Michael, but something did not go well, or perhaps we should say that it was terribly wrong and Ryan was born with a Hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy, (or by its acronym in English HIE). Which is that not enough blood reaches the brain and it runs out of oxygen.
After five days of fighting in the Intensive Care Unit, in which he was accompanied by his family, his small brain could not recover from the damage suffered and stopped. Hammac and her husband were facing a difficult choice: "Every mother wants her children to stay, but the more I thought about it, I didn't want to continue with him in case he suffered and they couldn't tell me if he suffered or not." After saying goodbye to him, they let his eldest son be with him for a while, during which he was singing some of his favorite songs.
In those moments of pain, one of the things that Hammac says gave him a lot of encouragement was to know that, somehow, his son had returned from death, since his heart was donated and could save the life of another baby.
During the following days he realized that his eldest son needed to be with his brother, talk to him, in short, I needed a place to cry. So he decided that he would do something special to remember his little baby and at the same time be a special place for his eldest son. He thought about what he likes most today and was nothing other than trucks and excavators, so he decided to place a sandpit on his son's grave.
Hammac says that his son asks him many times to go to play with his brother, while talking to him as if he were there and singing his favorite songs over and over again.
After this hard blow, Hammac has created a Facebook page to honor his son's memory, memory pages, where they donate books and blankets to help those parents who, like them, are going through the same thing.
It is difficult to put yourself in the shoes of someone with such a loss, it is something I cannot imagine, just as I find it very complicated to understand are the feelings of a brother who was left without that long-awaited companion for life, I see now to my children playing together and I feel overwhelmed by the idea that one of the two is gone. I find it especially difficult to understand how a child of such a young age is able to generate such a strong bond with someone who could barely see a few minutes.
The way of understanding death is shocking or maybe I should say, how to adapt to something you don't understand, of such a small child. As he is able to introduce it as a component in his world and continue playing with his absent brother as if he were a character in his own symbolic game. Perhaps it is the desire to have a brother to play with or maybe he believes that what has happened to him is a daily occurrence and that he has a brother who is in heaven.
Perhaps it is how he has understood that way we adults have to keep a loved one among us when he is gone, keeping his memory in our day to day. We understand that he is gone, that he will not come back, but will the little one understand it anyway?
Regardless of the above, Ashlee's idea of modifying something that in itself brings us sadness and longing, in an area of tenderness and love between brothers. Would you have done the same?
