All items used in the creation of this layout (with the exception of the two photographs) are from the digital scrapbook kit titled, Autumn Reflections, by SKrapper Digitals.

The 'Use 3 Papers' requirement for this challenge has been fulfilled as follows:
- Background (used paper 14)
- Green, over layer (used paper 18 )
- Autumn scene within the brown frame (used paper 20)

The title text is BlackJack and the journal text is Basset
Journaling reads as follows:
My son Evan has been my life's greatest heart ache. Don't misunderstand, I don't mean this derogatorily, what I mean is that my heart has felt the most intense degrees of both love and sadness related to the life and death of my sweet angel, Evan. The day he was born he took possession of a huge chunk of my heart and he will own it (and me) for the rest of my life.
I didn't think I would ever have children. Initially - because I didn't want them (I was in a not-so-great 1st marriage and I knew that I was not yet mature enough to be responsible for a life separate from my own) and eventually - because I didn't believe I could (I suffered many 'female problems' and my doctor indicated that achieving pregnancy may be difficult).
Then along came Ed; the true love of my life. We had a whirlwind romance and married after only 5 months of dating (he must have been the 'right' one since we've now been together for over 21 years).
Two weeks after Ed proposed, I learned I was pregnant! Amazing! We were both so excited and the pregnancy experience created an even stronger bond between us (as I'm sure other first-time-parent couples understand).
I remember the truly amazing and all-encompassing feelings of love I felt for Evan in the instant after his birth, the moment when I first looked at him. An emotion that is intensely euphoric and that is impossible to adequately describe with words. I remember too that I suddenly felt connected spiritually to the world as a whole and to all the women before me who've experienced this joy of motherhood for the first time; my mother, her mother before her and so on. My heart was overflowing with love and here it was, so cliché but what I felt, the first day of the rest of our lives; and wasn't it going to be wonderful?!
Sadly for us and for Evan, however, 'wonderful' was not the way things went. Ten days after Evan was born he began to have seizures. The story of his life from that day onward is long, involving many medical tests and procedures, a plethora of doctor visits, special services and therapies, neurologists, geneticists and physiatrists (no that isn't a typographical error – physiatry is a specialized line of medicine), frequent episodes of pneumonia and other illnesses, ambulance rides and hospitalizations, surgery, respiratory problems, eating difficulties and feeding tubes, lots of medications and the list goes on. Watching my son, my baby, suffer through all of this and having to accept the fact that I, his care-giver, his guardian, his mother, am helpless here - I'm unable to fix him, to make him all better, to provide him with a life of pain-free joy - caused my heart to break over and over again.
We were told early on (when Evan was in his infancy) that he most likely would not live beyond age 2. Having never found a cause for his disabilities, nor a cure, we knew early that Evan's life would be short. You would think that this would prepare us for the inevitable but it does/did not. Three months after Evan's 13th birthday, he had another pneumonia caused by aspiration with one lung collapsed and he was unable to breath on his own. Rather than allowing him continued suffering, we made the difficult decision to remove him from life support. My sweet, darling, precious Evan died on the 18th of September, 2003.
Many people think and believe, and even say aloud, that 'time heals all wounds' and that the emotional pain we feel from a loss today will one day be gone. Well, I can tell you, from both my own experience and what I've culminated from others who've shared their experiences with me, those beliefs are untrue, perhaps most especially when it is a child loss. Grief, over time, may cease to be part of your every, single thought, becoming less intense and less emotionally disabling, but the truth is that grief remains. We eventually learn to carry on with our daily lives, establishing a new kind of 'normal', loving and laughing and finding joy once again, in other things and other beings, but the child we lost is still deep within our hearts and never, ever forgotten.