I sit outside under the nearly new moon, the squeaking of bats exchanged for the sounds of the now sleeping crows. I sit outside in the darkest part of night and I beg of you: You, who have lost your child, your dreams, your love. You, who have your particular forms of loss that keep rolling in like ocean waves. You, who are broken, bent and cannot get yourself back together into any recognizable form. You. Tell me: now, much, much later, what you know of joy.

My marriage collapsed.

I lay in my bed shaking, gasping for these tiny, fast breathes,staring off at the ceiling. Gone but so terribly here. This is it. Here I am, letting go of the end of the rope I have been clinging to.

I woke him up, because he was able to sleep somehow that night, and told him he needed to take me to the hospital. I couldn’t survive this. I am now officially broken, not just my heart, but my spirit. I can take no more. He rolls over to me and puts his arms around me and reassures Vesta that everything is ok. I can hear almost nothing as I am underwater. There is a part of me that is worried, I don’t want her to see me this way, I don’t want her to be scared but all of that is too far away, I can’t reach it, I can’t bring it to the front. I am breaking apart, crumbling. He is talking to me, trying to explain, saying the things that have saved him in the past. I can’t hear him anymore, I can’t understand his words except that I was right every time. He is explaining and I am realizing how very, very far from myself I have come to make this work. To not lose my love, to not have lost our son and then each other, to not make it through this, to not put Vesta through another trauma. I tried and he has sucked every last ounce of will from my body.

“You have to take me to the hospital. I can’t do this.”

He keeps holding me and whispering to me and I begin to be able to breathe and the shaking subsides but eyes will not engage with the world. He gets up to do something for Vesta. I think, “I’m either going to work or going to the mental hospital.” As the panic subsides, this becomes my mantra: “Go to work or go to the hospital, go to work or go to the hospital.” Live or die.

“Go to work. Get up and go to work”, says this voice inside me that is not me but that speaks to me in these moments. In the weeks that followed Harvey’s death it spoke to me through the numbness and shock: “Go to Nia. Write a book. Adopt a baby.” I heard it then, when I thought I was fully shattered, and I listened. I knew it was showing me the path through this. And here it was again: “Go to work. Get up and go to work.” I thought, as I lay there in timelessness, “Yes. Go to work. Vesta needs you. Vesta needs you to be able to support yourself. Get up and go to work.”

Trembling and crying, I got up and dressed and put on makeup. I swept up the pieces and dumped them into the shell of my body and got there somehow and saw my clients somehow and when they had left, L came and held me as I cried and stared off into nothing and babbled on in shock on the floor of the spa. I am familiar now with shock and, this time, I knew I was in it. I knew this was the easy part. Some very rational, reasonable part of my brain began preparing: “Call Papa and ask him to find a hosipital for you to go to. You can barely take care of Vesat right now with your grief. Now this. You cannot take care of even yourself anymore. Call Papa and tell him you need help, at least outpatient. This is unsurvivable.” And then the irrational, that felt incredibly sane and logical: “Vesta will be fine without you. Better to have no mom than a shell of a mom. Then a broken, lost, non-functional mother to just fuck her up. It’s okay if you die. You can kill yourself and she will be all the better for it.” The rational planner comes back in and I tell L we need to set up a suicide watch. I have to have someone available to me all the time. I’m not going to make it through this.

She also talked to me. Told me things to help me stay here. Made sense. Empathized, loved, supported. But I was still underwater. I still couldn’t hear. Even if I could none of it would make sense. I spent the rest of the evening trying to enjoy the shock while I could. Waiting for the terrible moment when the true gravity of this would crush me.

The next day, I got up and went to work again. Trembling and crying, I got dressed and put on makeup and got to work somehow. I talked to M and I got angry. Really, really angry. I felt the fire of betrayal and the inability to communicate and listen and hear all around me and it burned inside my chest, it flared into my eyes, it energized me with a passion and furvor. Why could no one hear me? How could I let this go so far? Where are the people who are supposed to love me the most in this moment?

I was late now. Spending too long on the phone. I stormed into the lobby of the spa where everyone was waiting. They felt me come in before I was there. They were taken a back by the fire they saw. I wanted to say let’s just do this shit and get it over with. But it was a room full of people I didn’t know, save but one, and they were here to do a ceremony, a blessing on our business. They were here to do some woo-woo mojo and clear out the bad energies in the spa and bring in the good and help us get more of what we want from our work. It was bullshit and the last place I wanted to be: talking about patterns that are keeping us from what we want, places we feel stuck, setting intentions for what we want, creating with our words and thoughts the life and work we desire. Bullshit. I used to believe in all of that stuff and then my son died and I almost died and they couldn’t save my uterus and now my partner has abandoned me again. Fuck creating. Fuck your feathers and stones and sage burning. Fuck your ability to be able to believe that we have any power, any control, that there are forces working to keep us safe and bring us what we want. Let the path of your life that you have seen so clearly, that you have planned on without waiver for years literally disintegrate in front of your eyes and then tell me about your power, about the benevolence of the universe.

But. But I had agreed to be apart of this ceremony. A shamanic business blessing. Five women dressed in flowing skirts and tops, neck draped with amulets and satchels containing stones and talismen, were floating through the space, setting up and preparing. I am used to feeling outside of everything, apart from the rest of the world by now. I am used to just “doing what the humans do” even though so much of what other people find meaningful, what I used to find meaningful and inspiring, is like a foreign language to me. I know some of the words but the weight and signfigance are absent. Black hole absent. I do it anyway. I take that fire and I let it burn away the doubt and the resistance and I allow myself to particpate in what I committed to particpating in.

The have set up an altar. A large, Peruvian, woven blanket is on the floor, covered in precious stones and rocks, tiny statues of animals, gods and goddesses, shells, dry sage leaves, bells, rattles and feathers. They are creating a sacred space. A place where the light can come in, where we will sit and stay present and grounded and connected to the Earth plane while the shamans gallop off into the ether and heal our spa, the building, the land underneath it and the sky above it. They shake rattles made from shells and deer toes and call in spiritual allies, guides, angels and energies to help and support us during this ceremony. They beleive in this and I half-heartedly shake some bells. I close my eyes and breathe and practice being present. Not off with Harvey, not worrying about Vesta, not trying to understand what the fuck has happened to my marriage. I sit quietly for the first time in forever and reach around for the places of me that aren’t broken, for the shards and hold them closely and tightly and try to get through this.

The shamans go off into the space, burning what seems to be an entire sage bush and drumming an endless, strong and loud beat, like horse hooves, literally for hours. thos of us at the altar sit and talk and sing and try not to get lost in the beat of the drum. I start to move my body as I sit on the floor. I start to stretch and roll back and forth on the base of my pelvis and all of the sudden, I recognize the sensation in my hips. Wait. These are my hips. This is what my hips feel like when I move them this way and that way. Wait. These are my shoulders, rolling down and away from ears. This is spine curving up to the sky. All of the sudden, I recognize my body again. I have been living in this body, 5’1″ and 182 pounds of stranger. Nothing has felt the same since Harvey died. Nothing. I struggle to get up off the floor when playing with Vesta. I am swollen and puffy and fat and I don’t know who that is when I look in the mirror. I dance and go to yoga and walk and do all of these things in this creaky, tight, heavy body that is not my body. That I have begun to accept as my new body, my new, old-woman body that will not recover from the loss of my child, from birthing a baby who was dead and nearly bleeding to death on my bed while I wailed for my baby and then again on the operating table when they cut me, again, deep and wide, to save my life. Oh how I have cursed those doctors in the last 30 hours. How I have cursed my son for leaving my body in a way that stopped the bleeding the first time. Oh how much I have longed to have left with him or six months later in surgery and be spared this most recent devastation and all the months before, for that matter.

But now. Now, I feel my body again, as if it is mine. And slowly but surely, I begin to recognize my thoughts. I begin to recognize how I feel. I am not just remembering and recalling who I was. For the first time in 13 months, I am feeling it, I am experiencing it, I am recognizing myself from the inside. Nothing has changed: I am carrying the weight of my body, the seemingly endless losses that keeping coming like ocean waves in a tropical storm, knocking me down again and again and again, just when I think I’ve got some footing. And yet, something has profoundly changed. I say out loud, “I feel like like myself again.” And again and again I keep repeating, “You guys, I feel like myself again. I feel like myself again.” It is already a surreal experience, this altar, these shamans, the lure of that incessant beat to take the mind into a trance but the strangest feel, the most out of this world experience that I am having is feeling like myself again. I can’t stop saying it and the more I say it and the more I feel it, coming back into my body, recognizing myself like an old, old friend who I thought had left to never return, I begin to feel excited, elated, ecstatic. “I feel like myself again.” I have missed me. I have been gone and now, now I am coming back. I don’t know what is happening or how and I don’t care. I don’t care if I only feel this way for a few minutes. I don’t care if the drumming stops and I return to my “new normal”. I’ve been myself for a few hours and I want to stay. I want to stay here and I want to live. I want to be alive again. I want to look to the future and feel hopeful and inspired and connected. And I do. In an instant, I am back and I recognize myself for who I am fully. All of my intricacies, all of my quirks and flaws and strength and conviction. I can feel it in every cell. I am buzzing. I am alive. I am back.

The shaman comes into the room and calls my name, curse and and sharp she says “Monica.” and motions me to follow her. I enter the hallway with her and the drummer and I stand there eyes closed facing her as she billows sage up and down my body and fans me with feathers, all the while the drum of the horses hooves are right behind I close my eyes and I feel my heart…

When Vesta was born, when they put her in arms in the recovery room after the c-section, even in my aenesthetic state, I had a physical expereince of my heart center expanding. Inches from the center of my chest, I felt a force field of pure, divine love expand the space around my heart. It grew to be able to hold this baby, this being, my child inside of it. The love is so great when you hold your child for the first time that room must be made and I was lucky enough to physically feel that energetic expansion.

I held Harvey in the NICU, facing the wall because all of the tubes and wires didn’t allow me to hold him facing out. I stared at the beeping machines and the flashing lights and the medical equipment hung on the wall and I began to understand that my baby was going to die. And I felt that very same feeling except it’s exact opposite. Except that the force field around my heart tore apart. It was painful this time, I could feel each fiber being torn away from the others, like flesh being ripped apart. I felt my heart break as much as it had expanded and I recognized it. I remembered the feeling I had holding Vesta and now this feeling I had holding Harvey and knew right there and then in the fog and shock of the NICU, that my heart had literally been broken, torn through it’s center leaving ragged edges of grief and emptiness.

I stood in the hallway of my spa, being fanned and saged and for the third time in my life, I felt that space in front of my chest as a physical sensation. I felt it slowly but surely, mend. The gaping hole began to diminsh and close, the ratted edges moved closer and closer to each other and healed back together. Not like flesh, not leaving a scar, not a slow knitting together with extra tissue to reinforce. No. The tattered edges of my energetic heart sunk back into themselves. Where it was torn and now reunited, I felt for several moments a glowing, strong pulse, the fabric of this healing stronger than before and then, then it was over. Then I stood there and was whole again. Then my son, my dear, precious baby who had left me too soon, he moved into my heart. I felt him enter and snuggle into the space where his sister lives, too. Where no matter what happens to her, if by a final twist of horrible fate I lose my daighter as well, where she will always live. The essence, the purity of my children, both of them, moved into that space, that pure, divine, motherly love where they are safe and whole and here and cannot be lost. Both of them. Both of them. I have both of them in my heart. Where they belong.

The Shaman said nothing. She said “Done.” and then called the name of the next person to receive her individual healing as part of this blessing. I walked back to the front room and the altar and I said, “That was amazing.” I sat back down and I understood what had happened to me. On that day, April 28th in the middle of the day, my heart tore apart and I left. My baby was going to die and I was his mother and I was going with him. He is my baby and a baby needs his mother. So, I left. A part of me flew out of that whole in my heart to be with him when he got there, wherever “there” is. And I stayed there and I held on to me and he and I lived in both worlds for the past 13 months. And I set up an altar and had ceremonies and got tattoos and wrote this blog and wore jewelery to try to stay connected to him. My husband would say that we all we ahd was his memory to protect and I would think and sometimes say, “No! He is our child and we need to parent him. he is not a memory. We have so few memories of him He needs us to care for him and bring him with us into everything we do.” and my husband would say to me “Vesta is the one who is here and we have to take care of her.” And I would think and sometimes say, “No. They both need us.” I would think, say and beleive this becasue I was living here and I was living there. Because I was tethered to him and he to me. Because I was keeping a person who was not here, here and I was letting myself live partially in a realm that is beyond our comprehension. In that moment, in that miracle moment of healing, I came back. I let go of that rope, that tie, that anchor that bound me to my son and he did the same and we became free of each other. I instantly became able to be his mother and he my son. I instantly became able live in the world again, to make myself and my daughter the priority, to stop parenting someone who doesn’t need to be parented but to remain connected to him. To feel him all around me and inside my heart and guiding my way. I have what I can only describe as a healthy and full connection to the being who came into this world as my son and then swiftly left.

My grief is utterly and fully transformed. I am not angry, resentful or jealous of pregnant women, babies and toddlers. I ask mothers the age of their children who look about Harvey’s age and I smile now instead of take to my bed, imaginng that he would be smiling and laughing and stumbling through his first steps. I have not returned to my support group, to which I went religously, every two weeks for 13 months. I am geninunl;y happy for people who are pregnant or who have a new baby. I can hold them, be around them, coo and gush over them and my heart does not fall to pieces. I will grieve. I will grieve for the rest of my life. I will miss my son and I will wish he was here and I will wonder what he would be like. I will cry and wail and bemoan my plight but not the way I have this year. Not forcing it out onto the world but owning it. Feeling it as my loss, my own unique loss of Harvey Richard Walker, who I wanted, who we conceived on purpose and with great intention. I will greive only for myself and only for that one person who I will never know, who I will never see grow. It is mine and mine alone and by some miracle, by this actual miracle I experienced, I have felt no greater relief than this ownership, than this knowing that is now fully mine and mine alone.

The drumming stopped and we all gathered around the altar and I told them all of this. I told them that I had come back into my body, that I had released my son from his tether to this Earth, that I was myself again and that I was done with all that has hindered and hurt and made worse my grief at my husband’s hand. I told them that in only moments I was free of both my son and my husband. From he who I was to protect and couldn’t and from he who was to protect me and didn’t. They told me that I had experienced what is called an instant soul retrivial which none of them had ever seen, but only heard was possible. The woman who was drumming told me that during my healing in the hallway the Universal Mother, the mother of all of us came there with us. She said that she knows me and she knows my pain. That she feels my exact pain every time one of her children, every time any human, dies. That she is drawing strength and learning from me and that I am drawing strength and learning from her. That we are one. That we are the mother of all mothers. That we have this burden to bear and to transform and to bring good and light and healing into the world because of it. The shaman said she implores me to go out into the world and share myself with it and though no mother who has a lost a child believes she will ever recover, that no mother who ever lost a child will truly ever recover, but that what I am here for is to remind them, us, myself that the impossible is possible. That loss and love are the same. That expansion and tearing apart are the same. They are two leaves sprouted from the same root.

I don’t know how this will come about. I don’t know what my life path will look like and I am not searching for it. I am trusting. I am allowing the path that I thought I was on, the one with two living children, without a wound that won’t heal in my uterus, with a family intact who welcomes another child by some other means, I am aloowing that path to disappear and I am trusting I will step onto a path that leads me into the unkown. A path that I do not envision where it meanders it way to, nor what I find along the way. I have a compass now. My heart center talks to me everyday and I follow that. I listen now, openly and fully, to what it says. To when it feels right and when it feels wrong and go towards the right, even when that feels wrong. Even when the rest of my human self protests with every cell. Now, I listen to my heart and I let it guide me, without a plan, without a vision, but with an intention to let myself unfold

5/11/14
When my friends baby died and then was born she made sure she had things she smells that would always remind her of her daughter. I thought that was brilliant but I didn’t have that foresight. Except, I recently remembered that your nurse had a this orange oil she used to take off the tape from your face and head so it would hurt less. I asked her where I could get some, thinking about the bandaids your sister would inevitably have, and she didn’t know where I could get any. I had forgot all about that until I found myself wishing I too had a smell that reminded me of my time with you when you were in my arms. The other day, I decided I wanted a new essential oil. I went to the store and nothing spoke to me. But sweet orange oil was on sale for only three dollars and it’s “uplifting”, which I obviously could use, so I bought though it didn’t feel like the right match. Until today, when I took it out, put some on my temples and put the two together. It was the perfect match, as it turns out and now I have another small piece of you. Which like that altar, the tattoos, the pictures, the jewelry, all of the things I collect in an effort to . . . to what? Feel close to you? Have you back in someway? Feel less alone? Now, I have a smell of you. And I guess that’s all it is.

5/3/14
The irises are in bloom. I’ve never seen so many different color varieties: white, purple, brown, orange, yellow. Some are full, brilliant color. Some are outlined around their petals, some are shaded from the stem up. I had no idea there were so many different shades and combinations. I thought, if you were here, I’d point them out to you and say “See, Harv, these are Iris” as we walked by them, you tucked safely against my chest in the ergo. But I wouldn’t have done that. I never really paid attention to flowers and plants before. I’d be preoccupied in my mind, corralling Vesta, worrying over you, concerning myself with things I used to. I just see them and think about you. I have the leisure to look and notice and be slow now. The spring will always be you, slowly and beautifully coming alive for a short time before everything changes again.

I’ve decided. I’m not “doing it anyway” anymore.

I’m going to stop taking revenge on my grief. I’ve had enough of not feeling human but just doing human things in the hopes that someday, I will feel human again. The only way out is through, but now I’m going to lift my eyes instead of nose-to-the-grindstone my way through my life. I’m not going to stop crying until I am done crying. I’m going to fall apart and stay apart until I feel ready to pull it together. I’m not going to pull it together. I’m going to be together when I’m together and apart when I’m apart.  If I don’t want to, I’m not going to. If I can’t, I’m not going to convince myself that I can or that I should or worry about how it will affect other people or what other people will think of me.

I hid away this year on here, in these words. As soon as I could, I began to just act normal, to pretend, to put on a good face. After awhile, everyone becomes uncomfortable with grief, with vulnerability, with authenticity, when it’s not pretty. Even the griever. It’s terrible, it’s mundane, it’s heavy, it’s burdensome, it’s too much to bear. So we tuck inside of ourselves and we cry quietly at night or pull the car over and rage within its safe confines. Why do we do this? Why do each and every one of us do this and then pretend that we don’t? Why do we put the good face on for the world, sharing only our joys and successes? Why is “good” or “fine” to the question “How are you?” the only acceptable answer, the only answer we know how to respond to without awkwardness? We all have felt terrible and not said so because we  don’t even have a framework in the culture to respond appropriately to that honesty. We have to package everything up so it will feel okay when we leave.  For some reason, it’s not acceptable to feel anything but happy or fine or okay (even though most of us are not these things most of the time) and it certainly isn’t okay to be vulnerable enough to say so. It’s awkward to leave the conversation if there is something hard left unfixed or unqualified as having a bright side. But there’s is no fix for this, no silver lining, no one can imagine how to survive it. “I can’t imagine”, they say. I want to say, “Yes, you can. You can imagine. Understand is what you can’t do and that’s okay. That’s a given. But, yes, take a second or two or three to imagine and then, tell me what you want to say to me.”

I am not who I was and I am not going to be her ever again. Losing my child has turned me inside out, upside down and backwards. I don’t even recognize myself and it suuuucks. I hate it. I hate who am now, on many levels. I, more than anyone, would love to have my old self back. Be the friend who is dependable, generous, and consistently communicative. Be the mother who has patience and compassion for her living child, who doesn’t yell without thinking or scold too harshly for the seriousness of the misbehavior or just plain out ignore her cries. Be the wife who can take care of things, who is not continually falling apart, who is predictable in whether she will be smiling and warm when he walks in or barely acknowledge his existence for the evening. Be the businesswoman who follows up with clients and stays in touch, builds a strong network, remembers details about last session and life events to ask about without writing them down. Be the woman who smiles at the baby or asks the mom how her pregnancy is going or listens with genuine interest about how the parenting of two children is going.

When someone is in labor, I am torn apart. I am wracked with dread that someone will die. I am sure that they will. Just as sure as I am that they won’t. So, I am also plagued with penetrating envy because no one is going to die. Just mine. I have thought it and my friend said it: I took the statistical hit for our friends. It is so very unlikely that another baby we know will die. In the world outside of my support group, of course. In that world, where “babies don’t die” and people still feel immune. Where we are the freak accident, the statistic that is so low it’s miniscule. In the world where the low end of the statsitcal spectrum still bring comfort.

I am envious because despite all of that, most likely, their baby won’t die and they will get to hold their baby who is alive and can cry and will open its eyes and look back at them and nurse or eat and fall asleep and then wake up again, still alive. And mine died in my arms. And I can’t have another one. And even if I could, it would change nothing for me. I would still be without Harvey, still with this trauma, still with this same heaviness of grief, just with the exhaustion of a newborn on top of it.

I am also angry. I also have a rage inside me that is like a wild fire, unable to be controlled or contained, but just burns and destroy and kills until it puts itself out. I am angry that it was him, me, us. I am angry that I made decisions that can now be looked back upon and judged and doubted and used to justify his death. Used to stave off any fear that this could happen to “me”. That others can take my experience and tell themselves that I will: have my baby in a hospital, go to an OB, have a c-section, be where medical attention can be brought immediately and on and on. I am angry that they get to feel safe and sure and I live in their same world except nothing is safe, no one is safe and security is a foreign concept. I am angry that my body opened up, my insides tore apart and bled out and didn’t give me or anyone else any indication, except that I was light headed as I began to push him out, like many when in the most intense part of the most intense physical experience of our lives. I am angry at the doctors who allowed a woman at our support group who had classic signs, every single sign, of uterine rupture to continue to labor until her baby died. And that no one will quietly blame her for that because she made the right decisions, because she was in a hospital, because doctors were taking care of her. Doctors who ignored every sign because there was no reason, none at all, to believe that her uterus would rupture except that it did. Except that there was the tiniest possibility that began with a decimal point and several zeros.  Doctors whom I screamed at in my head as she told her story, doctors that I begged to notice, to use the less than half an hour of time they had to get that baby out, at doctors who did nothing instead.

I am devastated. That the world just keeps going. That people keep getting pregnant and survive their births. That my baby died. Once their baby is born, I fall to me knees. I want my baby back. I want him back in a way that I am sure that I will die. That I would do so willingly if only he came back. It’s not just that I want him, it’s that I want the world to have him. That I rather he have the chance, rather than me, if one of us must go. I remember the first time I held a newborn. He was the brother of the girls I nannyed for. I remember it like it was yesterday: I held him as the early August sun shown through the bay window on us and I thought, “I would throw myself in front of a bus to save this tiny, little human.” I was taken aback by this thought, by the swelling in my heart, by the activation of my human DNA to keep the youngest of us alive at all costs. I remember thinking I could never have my own children because if I felt so strongly the protector of this one, if I could fall so deeply in love with a child not my own, I could never handle the way I would feel about my own child. But I did. I held two of my own newborns and I can’t handle it. I can’t handle the love, the loss, the success and failure at keeping each of them alive. I didn’t understand then that even though I couldn’t handle it, I wouldn’t die. I would have to keep going, unable to handle it.

I remember on Saturday, the day Harvey was born, when I was finally able to hold him for the first time in the NICU. I remember that as it became clearer that he was going to die that my heart tore apart, it was if I  could literally feel it tear in half, that if I looked down to my chest I’d see it in two pieces. I remember thinking that this is the exact same feeling I had when I held Vesta for the first time: the center of my chest, my heart, expanded immeasurably so as to be able to hold this much love, to be able to sustain this much compassion and empathy for every other mother and parent in all time. As I held Harvey, I took note that my heart broke apart at the exact same measure, the exact same capacity, the exact same width, height and depth that it had swelled when Vesta was born. This heart that began to grow inside me for him, my Harvey heart, before he was even conceived, was irreparably and forever torn apart.

I also remember being in the NICU surrounded by four of the most important people in my life: my life-long friend of 33 years, the man who became my chosen brother at the age of 20, my best friend of nearly 15 years and my husband’s brother, who is his best friend and also like a brother to me. I remember being surrounded by all of them, all of them who love us beyond our knowing, who would do anything for us at any minute of the day or night, and currently were and would continue to for weeks, months, a year more. This chosen brother of mine who rushed to my bedside that very moment after hearing my voice on the phone say nothing but his name. He said “Hello”, I forced out his name, and he said “I’m coming over” and hung up and arrived minutes later. Danny’s brother who got the call about Harvey and was on the next plane to be with us. These amazing people who have saved my life more than once. I sat there holding my dying baby and I wished it on any one of them, on all of them. I wished with all of being that I could trade places with them. And the truth is, I still have that wish. I still want out of this so bad that I would wish it on my best friends, on anyone but me. People come to group and say, “I wouldn’t wish this on a dog” or “on my worst enemy” and I think to myself, “well, either you’re lying or you’re a better person than I am because I would give this to literally anyone else besides us.” Since Harvey died, I have wished that more babies died so that it would be more common and more understood. That I could walk through the world, not as an enigma but as one of us, one of us unfortunate souls who lost her baby. Who lost her babies. People used to respond to the question, “How many children do you have” with the number living and the number dead. Now one in four babies die in pregnancy, birth or in the first year of life but we don’t tell each other anymore. I have wished that my friend’s babies or children would die. Just so that I won’t be so alone. Just so that someone I hold so dear will sit with me and we can hold each other and we can weep and wail because we know, because we understand, because we can relate, because we are not alone in this crazy, fucked up universe that took our babies. No, we have each other to find understanding and comfort in. But of course, I also know too well that this, too, I will still be alone in this. It would do nothing for this grief except multiply it.  It would only create more sadness that I can’t handle and she can’t handle but we have to keep living through anyway and I don’t want anymore of any of that. No, there is no fix for this. None irrational nor rational. Just moment after moment where my mind tries to escape it, somehow, anyhow, even giving it away to those I love the most.

I haven’t felt happy, truly happy, for another person since Harvey died. I cannot hear of a pregnancy or a birth or even something wrong with a child from which they recover and feel genuinely happy. A baby was born recently that potentially had something wrong with it and I almost said out loud, “I only want to hear about it if the baby dies.” I’m so used to those kinds of thoughts that I almost said it like it was an acceptable thing to utter, to even think. It was a challenge for me at the March of Dimes walk to see the NICU babies there who had survived, whose families had averted this terror. In the beginning, whenever I would see a pregnant woman I would instantly and silently beg her baby not to die and then I would look away quickly as the fear, envy, angry and devastation all rolled in. Now, I cannot bring myself to ask one question of a pregnant woman and only do I congratulate her if she announces it to me.  Same for families with two children, but only if the second was after Harvey was born and especailly if the first child is near Vesta’s age. I can hardly look at those families. Their happiness and ease, even the struggle they don’t reveal, tears at me, grates on me. It is very specific and very narcissitic, this grief. Except when it’s generalized and I hate everyone for not having this burden to bear or for the relative ease I imagine their life to have. I believe that in this land of plenty, I am suffering the most. I have a file in my mind for “not problems”. My dear friends, my clients, aquaintences, people posting on Facebook, even strangers I over hear, they all have or have had problems that are not actually problems because their baby didn’t die. I used to be a life coach for God’s sake. I used to listen and empathize and meet people where they were at without judgement. Now, I spend most of my time rolling my eye inside and making my lot in life out to be the worst case scenario, outside of say torture and war (but it’s right up there!). And these are only some of the crazy thoughts, the mixed up emotions. I am forgetting and leaving out many. I will spend many moments in the days ahead thinking that “I should add that one to the blog post!”

That’s where this shit takes me. It takes to me places I could never imagine in a million years. It collapsed me into a pile of the smallest, worst, most selfish emotions and thoughts that a human can have. And it hasn’t let up. This is why I don’t feel human anymore. Because I can’t believe that humans could feel the way that I do, could have these thoughts, these wishes, these emotions. Could lose so much of themselves. So much of what made me “me” seems to have died with my son. I’m in this trench, in this muck and it’s worse than I imagined because it reverberates out into every crevice of my life.

And even now I want to make some apology for all of this. I have an impulse to now talk about the light that I can see shining down on me as I lay here covered in muck in this trench. I want to tidy this all up. But I’m going to resist. I’m not going to do it because it’s not done yet and there’s no silver lining, no pretty ribbon to tie it up with, at least not that I can see. I’m not going to because I can’t be the only one. Because there is some mother out there, empty armed and broken hearted and feeling inhuman for all of this insanity going on inside of her. Not exactly mine but close to it, or some of it and not others or maybe all of it. And now, she is less alone. She feels less crazy. And I am here for her. And I am here for me. This blog has always felt like a way to give some of this away. To vomit my experiences all over my computer and click publish and somehow they go away a little bit. Somehow I get a little respite just by saying it out loud. So, you, Mama. You reading this, longing with every cell for your child, feeling crazy in your mind, your body aching and nauseated, you write it down too or paint it or scream it from an isolated cliff somewhere. But get it out of yourself a little bit. Give it to others for a minute or two. You’re not crazy. Or maybe we are but if we are, at least we have each other.

I just want my baby back. That is what is at the end of every thought about him, every heartless wish, every insane, hateful emotion and thought that my grief brings up to the surface. At the point of many months, a year, more than a year out, if I can get to that end, if I can get to “I want my baby back”, then there is relief. If my husband can hold me up while I wail, if I can pour these deepest, darkest tears out alone in the middle of the night, if I can get  to “I just want my baby back” there is a purity. There is a freedom. There is a truth. A truth that feels universal, an absolute truth in my universe: I just want my baby back.

Because that is the seed of all of this. All of this wishing terrible things on others, the inability to feel happiness for other or empathize with anything less than a dead child, all of this anger, hate, envy, and devastation, it’s all because I want him back. Pure and simple. And the more time that passes, the harder it is to get there. The loss gets confounded by the tricks and twists and turns my mind takes me on. It get confounded by living my daily life and mostly being okay or pretending to be okay. It gets confounded by interacting with other people, people who I love and hold dear and now, out of the fog of early grief, everything is more confusing because I don’t know how to be anymore. Others don’t know how to be around me for fear that they say the wrong thing or do the wrong thing. And to make matters worse, they might get referenced here.

But here is me. It reflects on no one but me. I went for a walk tonight in the middle of writing this, my very deepest, darkest most secret thoughts, and I thought to myself “You are writing a journal entry and then opening it up and offering it out for the whole world to see. Don’t do that.” I was talking to myself about stopping publishing these because it’s not just about Harvey anymore or my own personal raw grief, it’s about people I love, people I work with, people who are not volunteering themselves to be written about and referenced. People who have not consented to be vulnerable. But I have. I have chosen to be fiercely vulnerable. To put what is true for me out there for the world to see. To make the world a softer place, a place with more understanding of the full specturm of beign human. This blog is about me, in the end. Every entry, every word, is my current grappling, my current phase in this journey I don’t want to be on. I am pushing myself through fear and doubt and confusion and doing it anyway (oh, darn it…).

My next challenge is to become fiercely vulnerable out in the world. To keep on crying when I need to keep crying. To tell those very same best friends that I can’t do it anymore today and I need help. To stiff upper lip it when that’s all I can manage. I want to be more real. I want to be more true. I want to heal and recover and mend. I want to stitch myself back together and I want to do it with my tears, my honesty, my vulnerablility, my hope, my fears, and with the support offered to me time and time again by those who love me, those who have only just met me and every one in between so kind to offer themselves to me. I need to take care of myself which means I need to let others take care of me.

I have no hope to be beautifully or expertly put back together. My stitches will be imperfect, my edges frayed, some parts of me will remain forever torn away from each other. But, within the confines of that imperfection, within this experience riddled with duality and contradiction and hypocrasy, I have a new strategy: no more apologizing, no more pushing myself too far, no more sacrificing my own well-being based on what I believe others want or need from me. Perhaps I will get “worse” before I get “better”. But I have to get better because I want to live again.

I’ve been noticing the quiet again, when your sister is out playing at the neighbors and your dad is at work. That went away for awhile. How quiet your absence is. How heavy the silence. What a heavy yet empty presence your absence is. How you are almost here.

I’ve busied myself with daily life and gotten back to the routine, building a new website, picking up the house, answering emails, paying bills and all of the many things I’d like to get to. They’ve all gone back to normal or are incorporated into this “new normal” I’m told I’ll get used to. I don’t have the energy or the space inside of me to dash from one thing to the next like I did in my old life. I’m tired all the time, awash in the doldrums, uninspired. So, I hear you again. I hear you not here. I notice again how easy my life is without you. How, as your sister gets older, I have more and more time to myself, to do the plethora of things I want and need to get done. Without the sparkle and shine they used to have. Without even the annoyance I used to have with daily chores getting in the way of what I really want to do. Living with that sense that I have a finite amount of time that is not nearly enough to do all of the things I want to in this life. But without you and opposite of most people who nearly die twice in a year, I have lost all sense of urgency. Time has slowed to a snail’s pace. My possible 60ish years stretching out ahead of my like a road with no end. Seemingly endless hours to do more than I planned for my life, to get all the things done. There is no longer a sense of urgency.

I was really irritated during your whole pregnancy. In a nearly constant state of annoyance. I couldn’t wait for your dad to get home and then when he did, poor guy, I was annoyed that he was home. I wanted so much to grow my business here. With or without you, my work is a lifeline for me. It feeds me so fully. Gives me a chance to get out of the house, be an independent grown-up again and make a contribution to others. As my belly grew and I began to viscerally remember what the first few years with a new baby are like, I began dreading it. I fretted and feared and questioned. I imagined the approaching 3-4 years and thought, “what about me? What about my dreams?” The idea of putting myself aside for another several years felt like an eternity. If this first year is any indication, I had no idea what an eternity actually is and how precisely long, how endless, the next 3-4 years will be. On the flip side, I know understand acutely, both from your loss and my plan to care for another baby and your sister being so independent now, the exact shortness, the blip on the screen of my life, these first few years with you would be. How insignificant. Without you, I now understand how my work  would wait. That tightening the belt, that devoting myself mostly to and your sister for the time you are little is the best thing I could ever do for myself. These were my happiest years and there is time, plenty of time, for work and career and dreams of my own. When I was pregnant with you, Virgina Wolf’s book “A Room of One’s Own”, about how women need space to create, need something to call theirs and their’s alone, banged around inside of my head almost daily. “Yes, I would think, I understand now, Virginia. I need a room of my own.” Except I don’t actually. Room’s of our own are a priveldge granted to or yearned for by those who have almost everything else, who are untouched by loss, who are not just surviving. I only wished for this actual and proverbial room before I knew, knew for real, that one of the most precious beings in my life could just disappear before my eyes, like he wasn’t even here in the first place. No, I no longer long for that room alone to create and have space. I don’t need it anymore. It’s quiet enough here without you.

Even in the words spoken silently in my own mind, my thoughts of Harvey strike me as clinical. Height, weight, appearance. I can only reason that the condition of his brain, one of his doctors described it as having suffered a “hypoxic insult”, a phrase I find strangely appealing, leaves room only for speculation and in these raw moments, speculation amounts quickly to grief. The grief will come and keep coming but if I can arrange to have it arrive in measured drips and drops over time like the liquid from an IV bag, that seems preferable.

But that leaves me with facts are these:

• Harvey Richard Walker
• 8lb 13oz
• 22 1/2 inches
• Dark hair in fair quantity
• Button nose, big feet, narrow ass
• While unresponsive to light stimulation, eyes appeared dark but otherwise remained closed

• Having never made a peep, the sound of his voice remains unknown as does what, if anything, he heard, felt, smelled or tasted

• Resembled his big sister

In case that he could have registered sensation, here are some things he would have experienced:

• The bright lights and general commotion of a hospital emergency room
• Tubes, wires and sensors at various levels of invasiveness
• The artificial lowering of his body temperature to forestall further organ damage

But as time passed, he would have become aquainted with his mother’s embrace, the voices of his parents, family and friends and the sensation of tears from his father’s eyes striking his cheek. Soon enough, he would have felt the relief of being disconencted, bit by bit from machines and the soapy warmth of his first bath. Not long after that he would have been comforted by being bundled in a clean blanket, held in his parent’s arms while being serenaded with lullabies. And finally, as his breathing tube was gently removed, he would have known the death we all hope for: peaceful, while sleeping and surrounded by love.

After donating his heart and eyes, Harvey’s cremated remains sit in a small tin in his family’s apartment, where we will, with time, figure out what to do with them as we will figure out what to do with our memories of and feelings about him.

Harvey has joined the large circle of babies whose lives ended before they would begin. Monica and I have joined the larger circle of parents left bereft by their loss. And you all have joined the still larger circle of those who, through thoughts and prayers, love and food, assitance and favors, and generosity of all descriptoin, help us to turn grief to hope and bitterness to gratitude.

There is a sentiment that, before having this experience I would have shuddered to even entertain. As the truth of our situation settled upon us, I struggled to keep it in the dark corners of my mind. It seemed to withering to comprehend. Too existential to do anything but harm. Of course, as banished thoughts all eventually do, it kicked it’s way into the light of my consciousness and, to my relief, I discovered it was all right. That it had no purchase on reality and was therefore harmless. So harmless that I can speak it out loud: “What a waste.””All for nothing.”

But if it is true for Harvey, it is true for all of us. Intellectually, we know that. In the grand scheme, our several decades are no more or less significant than his several hours.

Spiritually, or at least in the medium that transcends intellect, I cannot say why I do not fear those thoughts. Of course, in illuminating matters of the soul or spirit, words never have been suited to the task. Feelings are the things here, or lack thereof.

As my son felt no cold, nor discomfort, not pain, so too I feel no fear of those thoughts. I only feel what remains when fear is gone and if there are words for that, they are warmth, tenderness and love.

-Danny Walker, Harvey’s dad

Read by him at Harvey’s memorial service

Sunday, May 5th, 2013

Regents Center, Portland, OR

Trigger Alert: This post contains the story of an early-term miscarriage, which I did not experience as devastatingly as most women do. Though, I certainly would now. If you are suffering an early loss or have trauma from an early pregnancy loss, perhaps skip this post.

Today is your due date. Or rather, the anniversary of.

I don’t even believe in due dates. In my home birth/hypnobirthing world we call them “guess dates” because that’s what they are. They are the guess of what day is 40 weeks, which, in and of itself, is a guess of how long it takes for a human to gestate. So babies come “early” and babies come “late” and the rare baby comes “on time”, the coincidence of arriving on the “due” date. All sorts of crazy shit happens on and around due dates: scheduled c-sections, inductions, psychological distress, near unbearable impatience and discomfort. The due date is calculated based on the mother’s last period, which is not when she conceived. It is  even more rare that a woman would conceive right after her menses. Since there is weird cultural pressure that begins on or around the due date, I didn’t share your guess date with many people. Your sister was born two weeks after her’s so, though second births often come earlier than firsts, we just said you’d arrive “at the end of April”.

“When’s your baby due?”

“At the end of April.”

We guessed right.

We’d never have guessed that you would die, though. Since your sister was born via c-section after an extended attempt at home (I used to say she was my “accidental hospital birth”), I was more cautious in my imaginings of your birth being successful at home. I would say “We’re going to try at home but if I have to go to the hospital, if I have to have a c-section, I’m totally open to all the possibilities. Healthy mother, healthy baby is all we want.” Nobody is going to die, I thought, I believed, I comforted myself. Babies die, I’d say. But not my baby, of course. I’d known and heard of people’s babies dying or older child or pregnancy ending but not mine.

I’d lost a pregnancy but that’s most likely because there was something wrong with the fetus and the wise, knowing body letting it go, I rationalized and I believed. It was awful. The hormones of pregnancy loss are reminisecnt to the waves of grief of this past year. Up and down, growing closer and closer together and then further and further apart. For me, however, they never returned. Your dad kept his travel plans for opening day in San Francisco and my friends here rallied around me. N came from Seattle and went shopping for supplies with me and laid on my bed with me for hours. L and M took Vesta for most of 2 days. R called me on the phone and talked to me and helped me through the emotional/spiritual side of it. Everyone silently disapproved of your dad leaving, but he and I didn’t get it, we were in what I now understand to be a level of shock. The reality of it didn’t hit me until the afternoon after he left and I desperately wanted him to return.  Back then, not insisting your dad stay with me, not knocking some sense into both of us before he boarded the plane was my biggest regret. Eleven weeks pregnant and 6 weeks gestational age, I couldn’t even see the baby on the ultrasound screen. Now, of course, I don’t know why this wasn’t more devastating. I hardly even told anyone. We were pregnant with you three months later and you were due 5 days after the first anniversary of when we lost our middle child. A good omen, I thought. I took comfort that one year later, we’d be together holding our newborn. Now, part of the baby loss community, I know you were our Rainbow Baby, a child born after a loss. But you died and I am infertile so there is no rainbow, let alone a pot of gold. What do you call a Rainbow Baby who dies, too? What do you call a mother of three who parents just one living child? Some call her blessed, those without my good fortune of being able to conceive, carry and birth even one child.  I can’t get there yet. I mean, the highest part of me knows it without doubt but I don’t live there much anymore. I live here, now, in the smaller parts, in the jealousy and hatefulness and anger and sorrow of life without you.

I don’t even believe in due dates but it’s something I have for you. I used to think that all of these milestones, anniversaries, trigger days were things I made up that made my grief worse, that allowed me to wallow. But it’s not true. They are my connection to you. If you were here you’d have an Easter basket tomorrow but instead your absence weighs on me, the relative ease of parenting one living child instead of two just as much of a burden as hear other mom’s complain about what I want more than anything in the world. The juggle, the compromise, the guilt. If you were here, I’d say “Today was your due date, Harvey” just like not one September 25th passes that I don’t think about Vesta’s due date. Just like how I spend the 2 weeks leading up to her birthday reflecting on that sacred time I had with her at the end of my pregnancy. You are no different. I celebrate milestones and birthdays and special days with her and I am not making them up to increase my joy. I’m just being human and making meaning and marking time and celebrating growth and being alive. Just like everything else with having a living child and a dead child, you both get my love and my attention. Yours just has the added depth of grief. You are just not here. So, I mark them and I mourn you more deeply on these days and I try and I try and I try to connect with you. On this day: the day you were supposed to be here. This day among days that you were supposed to be here.

Dear Harvey,

I was about to write about how I am feeling the wave come again. But I got here, saw that your Tio had written a comment and I reread the post to put what he wrote back into context. I forget what I write. I forget what I feel. I still have short-term memory loss. I still put one front of each other and get through my days, missing details and forgetting memorable, even enjoyable, events. So , I came here to talk about the wave that has hit but I already wrote that it hit. I wrote in March that the wave was coming and now . . . well, now, it’s here. Or it’s back. Or it’s getting harder to ride. Or it’s building up speed, and height and depth, as waves do.

I feel like I’m back at the beginning, newly bereaved, but without the benefit of shock and with the detriment of time, which brings the illusion that I should be “better” or “further along”, which brings a curious sense of regression, which has brought those around me more solace than me, that has left others tired of my grieving, ready for me to move on get back to normal or be happy or look on the bright side. I remembered last night how I used to long for that first week after you died. That week when the world’s grief was equal to mine. When people flew in from all over the country, when flowers were sent, funds to provide food for us were raised by friends and strangers alike, when no one need ask if I was okay or what was wrong because they knew and they felt it too, acutely.

I feel like I’m back at the beginning with the purity of the loss alive again, less confounded by conversations and circumstances and analysis. While, at the same time, confounded by conversations and circumstances and analysis. But there is a sweetness to this revived pain, to the sobbing, to the seeping. There is a sweetness to just the plain old “I want my baby back”, “why did this happen to me”, “maybe I’ll wake up soon” grief. I have more and more moments these days where I just purely miss you, which is the only word I can think of, “miss”, and which carries exactly none of the weight that this impossible heaviness deserves. There is a sweetness because this place, which has gotten stuffed down deep, which actual has gotten better in that, in the past few months, it has ceased rendering me nearly non-functional at worst and exhausted at best,  this place: it is you and me. It is how I knew you the best after you born and after you died. We lived there together for awhile, I could feel you there, before there was dancing light and ladybugs and any scrap of meaning, there was pure, unadultuated grief. As it changed, as the early days/weeks/months of grief began to change, it was the first time I mourned my mourning process. How would I know you as my grief stopped being acute? If I changed, you too would have to change, but how could you? How are the dead able to change? You do. And I do. So, we do. You grow in my experience and my grief grows with you. It’s not the little ones anymore, it’s the almost walking, it’s the wobbly standers, it’s the starting-to-look-more- like-a-toddler-than-a-baby. In the best of these worst moments, I try to soak up that sweetness. It’s the worst consolation prize ever.

But there is all this convolusion now, as time has passed. Now there is the management of well meaning comments. There is the sense of isolation, even when among friends. There is the loss of the shock, the slow realization over the past nearly twelve months, that you are gone, that you are not coming back, that even if we could have another baby, I would just be grieving while having another baby. That this is not going away. My life has stretched out before me as an endless path of everyday without you. There is the nearly continual existential crisis: everything is so meaningful and important and yet absolutely not at all. It’s maddening. And truly, it’s only the beginning. It’s getting used to this “new normal”. It’s mourning that I will never be again who I was, who I am now, and who I will become. It’s that your absence touches everything that I see and do because I am free to see and do things that I never would be able to if you were here to care for and because everything I see and do is changed by your absence. It’s learning to live in the duality, in the gray area, in the place most people fear to the marrow. I hate this life now. I hate that life just goes on. That I get better or don’t or have such heightened awareness and such deep confusion. I hate that people talk to me about what I now call their “not problems” and when they don’t because my problems are so much bigger than theirs, I hate that too.

So here I am on the one year wave. Your family will start arriving. I’ll cry everyday from now until I don’t anymore. My friend said in group, as she came upon the second anniversary of losing her son, that at least she knew what to expect this year. At least, she knew that the weeks and days leading up will bring the grief in overwhelming waves. That her thinking would again become foggy, that she would end her days exhausted, that the dazed, half present, just get through the day lifestyle would return. That it would pique and the old but familiar grappling would resurge. That all of it would last a little while after and taper off as the wave let her down and by summer, she’d return to normal. Well, to the new, unfamilar, never quite comfortable like an ill fitting dress, normal.

Look at that. Look at all of that. All of those words, all of that thought, all of that shit just to say: This sucks. I miss you with a purity only matched by my love. You are both sides of the coin. You are my everything.

I’m back to this, back to the magical thinking, so I’ll tell you, I’ll implore you: if you ever want to come back, I’ll be here waiting.

I love you, son.

Eleven months ago you were still here.

I’m riding the bus and have this space between and the weight of this day, this 11 month anniversary of your death, scoots over and sits on my lap. But then I think, it’s 10:24am. You were still alive.

You were still alive eleven months ago right now. I was holding you. We were starting to really understand that you were going to die. We were talking to the doctors, the donor people, your nurse Carrie was quietly bustling around your room, under the white board on the wall with HARVEY WALKER written across it. Eleven months ago, you weren’t dead yet. Not at 10:24am.

I have wondered why we didn’t spend more time with you on Saturday. Besides having labored for two days and, unbeknownst to anyone, my internal bleeding, we didn’t know you were going to die. Except for the part of me deep in my soul, deep in my heart, deep in that inner well of knowing. From the place that whispers that you can simulatneoulsy hear and ignore. Not on the surface. Not in the human mind. There I had hope. There I would go home, sleep, wake up and we’d fight this battle and get you saved. Because miracles happen. Because we weren’t sure yet. Because we didn’t hear the doctors’ words like I hear them now: already knowing but not able to just say it, not able to say anything that might sway us one way or the other. I remember Dr. Baxter saying that the “insult” to your brain was very severe and the prognosis was “grim”. The next thing she said was something about honoring our desire to keep you on the machines, keep doing tests, and then she said again, in her delicate, baby-dying, doctor speak, that it didn’t look good. So my human mind heard, desperate for hope and possibility, we’ll keep testing, we’ll keep him on the machines. She wouldn’t say that if there wasn’t hope, right? Wrong.

But when the phone woke me up at 7:30 Sunday morning, a strange number, that knowing reared it’s head. Before actually being awake, just at the milisecond my brain registered the sound of the ring, the deep knowing, the whisper was heard. Your vitals were decreasing and we should come right in. He’s dying. Go.

I asked your dad if he would want to donate your organs if it came to that. He said yes. We didn’t know yet how ravaged your insides were. We were driving to the hospital. I remember the way to the hospital with incredible clarity. I have forgotten so much and what I remember is so fuzzy but I can see the exit onto the highway, the left turn, the sign we drive past before we turn in. The bumps in the sidewalk as they wheeled me in, going around a new piece of cement in our path, the chair mistakenly hit against the side of the elevator. The locked doors, the beeping, the hand sanitizier, the length of the hallway from the door to your room, nurses station on the left. I remember my way to you. I could get there in my sleep.

I don’t know at what point on Sunday we realized you would die but we talked to the donor representatives, your uncle re-explained to me what they said, we made decisions that were then taken out of our hands because everything, except your heart was not undonatable. We must have known by then. When Carrie suggested we have a photographer come, do hand and foot prints, a harpist could come play, we must have known by then. When Dr. Gee came in and talked endlessly about the extent of your brain damage, using the same words “insult” and “grim” over and over. We must have known by then. I don’t know when the mind caught up with knowing, when the dream awoke to the reality, I can’t remember the exact moment. I don’t think I could fully comprehend it. It was the beginning of my life taking me by the hand and leading me through it. It was the end of my sense of volition, of control, of influence over what happens to me. It was the beginning of the end for me and just the opposite for you.

I have strong visions coming back. Last night as I closed my eyes, I saw the back of your body, naked and purple, the cord over your shoulders. I saw it fall away as Heather turned you over and then I saw your face and I knew you were dead and my cells recognized you at once. He looks just like my other baby. There was some genetic click, some shift in my genome at that moment, a moment of completion, of wholeness that rippled back through my history, our ancestors: Here he is, the next of us. He will come and he will go and this collective shift will be passed on in the cellular memory, in our collective knowing, me and all of those that came before me. We recognize you, we hold you, we sing to you.

I wish you could have stayed.

After I got off the bus, I took your cousin to the cafe. A little boy crawled over to me, pulled himself up to standing on the coffee table, looked at me with giant brown eyes, pacifier moving in and out Maggie Simpson style and handed me the toy he was after. It all happened so quickly but also so slowly. I watched his little body. The instable sureity of the newly mobile. I thought, you are like my son. You are where he would be. I saw how big he was and also how small. Not an infant, but not a toddler. For the first time in eleven months, I asked the question I absolutely always avoid since you died. There is a terror in it for me. There is a fear of the slippery slope. Of the rubber necking I might do. How I might subject some poor family to the horror in some horrible way: like staring to long, asking too many questions, touching their child. I always shake the thought out of my head. But not today for some reason. Today, I asked his mom “How old is he?”. “Eleven months” she said, slightly annoyed as she scooped him up and went on to whatever needed to happen next that was overwhelming her. I knew it I thought as I watched his little head bounce above his shoulder, his big eyes locking mine, not letting go until she was gone. I waved to him just before they were out of sight.

And then I sat down with Matilda and read her the book she’d chosen.

It rained all day on March 28th, 2014. Downpour, real rain. On and off but mostly rain boot, rain coat, umbrella rain. I had thoguht earlier in the day that since we’d had such a dry winter, that it was almost like the clouds had just saved it all up and were letting it all go today. Later, I lay in acupuncture in the afternoon and I heard the rain pelting the roof, saw the drops careen down the window pane and thought, at least the sky are crying. At least the heavens knows how immeasurably tragic this is. How deserving of downpour and sobbing your absence is. At this the sky is with me, gearing up, getting it out, for the months to come.