Time smudges; phantoms honor

Did you ever make a pencil or chalk drawing?  When you first draw it, it's so crisp and clear.  Then, over time it gets smudged, blended, erased some until it's softer, less clear, less vivid, smeared.  Time is just a tool that smudges memories until they have only a resemblance to the truth.

I am terrified of the time in the future when I may realize that it’s hard to picture her face by memory.  I am scared to come on the day when I can no longer remember what it felt like to dream of a future with her in it.  I am leery of the day when the world moves on and expects me to have moved on too.  I am frightened of the day when I’ll be asked how I am and I’ll answer ‘good’, without having the thought of “how do you expect me to answer, I had to send a baby to heaven before I went?”

One day these things will happen.  One day I will remember her and be sad because it will have been a while since I’d thought of her, my Gabbie, my angel, the baby I grew but never got to keep. Who will honor her if even her mother let her go?  Making peace with letting go makes me cry.  I don’t want to make peace with it.  I don’t want to let her go; I don’t want time to smudge the memory I have of her.  I hate the thought that one day it will be harder to recall her face than it is to think of other less important things.  There is a sort of guilt in forgetting; if I don’t remember her everyday then who will?  She deserves so much more life than she had.  How will I give life to her, if time smudges away my memory of her?  I am afraid to forget the face of my baby and I don’t know how to make peace with the fact that one day my memory of her will be smudged. 

Time does not heal all wounds, it teaches you how to get used to the pain, and it smudges away the edges of the memory that caused the pain like a chalk drawing until you can only make out the impression of the picture, and the details become obsolete.  Damn Time… I see what you are trying to do; I don’t want to forget the details, because it’s all I have of her, even if those very details are what make me stay in pain. 

Ideally, I’d rather remember, and figure out how to live without her here.  I think of it sort of like an amputee.  I can remember what it was like before I lost her.  I can remember the accident that took her.  I will forever be without her now but I will learn to cope somehow without having her even if every day I recognize how life would be different if I had her still. They say that amputees have phantom "feeling" in the missing appendage.  I'd rather have phantom feelings of having her than no pain at all.  There is an honor in phantom feelings, an honor that says, "I had you, I remember you, I can still envision what it would have been like to keep you, but I have learned to live without you, even if I find myself on occasion, intensely wishing you were here with me still." 

Or maybe I have it wrong.  Is it honorable to move on without heartache, without phantom feelings of having her still?  Surely time will tell?