Domestic Violence Killed My Son
Today at 3:00 pm one year ago…. I walked into a funeral home a day before Coltons wake … collapsed in the front parkway outside of it and threw up and scream cried before Frank Bucaro and John Brust the mortician brought me to my feet and navigated me to the back vistitation viewing room and I had to walk up to my baby laying lifeless and preserved in front of stained glass windows with music playing softly in the background as if he was sleeping.
I remember seeing him there laying his face beautiful wearing the last outfit I choose for him to wear (blue jeans, a grey long sleeve shirt with dinosaurs on it , little white socks and a hat that my friend had to go choose for me that was at the request of the funeral home to cover his shattered skull they pieced back together with prosthetics.
His hat was a sleeping bear 🐻 hat that fit so perfectly that I knew he was meant to be laid to rest eternally in this exact outfit in this exact hat and he was standing there saying it’s perfect momma. The men carried him over to me in a rocking chair set off to the side and placed him in my lap on a changing pad they had created to make sure his fragile head and body were kept safely but so I am as Coltons mom could rock him, sing to him and kiss and hold his hands one last time before the next days wake.
I promised Colton and myself that I would not cry in front of him because he deserved to have the same momma who laid next to him everyday breastfeeding him to sleep and just rubbing his hands and feet and kissing on his cheeks. I didn’t want to “wake” him and I didn’t want him to have anything but peace and love with him in these moments like I had always given him. I could feel him wrap his beautiful wings around me and it felt like he was rocking both of us in these hours.
After I held him for about 4-5 hours they told
Me it was time to let him rest till tomorrow because I was warming his body too much….. (as a mom that was so hard to hear-my once beautiful, healthy baby who was sleeping in a bed with breast milk in his belly was now gone and his cold preserved body was left behind) The hardest moments was looking down and knowing that after the next two days one being his wake and the next his funeral his casket was going to close and I would never ever see him or feel him ever again in the human form I grew and nurtured for 8 months in my belly and almost 19 months in my arms.
Today was the first time one year ago I got to see my baby whom I hadn’t seen in 4 days which before then I had never been away from him for more that a couple times for 3 hours maximum time – and those four days seemed like eternity ……. and now this year feels 1,000 times worse and absolutely endlessly infinite minutes that have passed by living here on earth without half my heart and half of my soul. It was holding him then that I knew I had to make sure another mom or dad never sat at a funeral home holding their baby saying goodbye forever because their abuser decided to kill their family.
Abuse it abuse no matter how small
One hand in heaven one hand on earth
Healthy love is safe love
This picture is how he slept everyday in my bed next to be breastfeeding- this is the exact position that his “father” shot him 10+ times in.
Domestic violence is real and it’s deadly .
It was almost three caskets lined up that day….. but God gave us voices again for a reason and it’s to change the world so this doesn’t happen again.
