Six years

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Six years hit me like a tsunami. 

For the previous five years, the weeks leading up to my daughter’s birthday and death day were reliably teary, and thoughts of her never far from my mind. I would cry frequently, not want to socialize much, and prepare for our remembrance rituals to take place on her birthday. It was as though I was a moon slowly being pulled from an outer orbit to an inner orbit of the planet of grief. A flood of tears that began slowly, with a trickle, then a stream, and finally the deluge. A predictable order, each phase easing me forwards. 

This year, a fellow baby loss mom asked how I was doing the week before Olivia’s birthday, and I answered that this year maybe I was too busy with life, parenting, work and political goings-on, to really linger in that place of mourning. I hadn’t cried yet. The thought that I was moving past this stage of grief in some way made me sad, too, because it felt like I was losing something else. Losing some of the emotional and even physical closeness to Olivia.

Then, two days later, seemingly out of the blue, the wave of grief hit me all at once as I was getting ready for bed. One minute I was chatting, and the next minute - sobbing, shaking, ugly crying for hours on end, until I exhausted myself to sleep for a few hours and then started again when I woke up in the morning. 

I needn’t have worried. The grief was still there, just a little behind schedule, compressed. And as awful as those few days felt, it was a relief to know the closeness was still there, existing on a sort of subconscious spiritual core level. 

As time spins out, farther away from the moments when I held her, she seems almost like a dream at times. Did I really have a daughter? Was I ever so young and naive, large with pregnancy, blithely smiling for the camera, happy? 

In other moments, the magnitude of our loss is revealed in new dimensions. When I see my son playing alone in the living room, making his toys talk to each other in the absence of his big sister. And see this scene repeating day after day, week after week, year after year. When he says of the poppies we planted for her, ‘Olivia will like these, when she’s alive again.’ When I watch my niece growing up and wonder if Olivia would have looked like her, had dimples like hers. But I’ll never know. Children grow, change, smile, ask questions. But the dead don’t come back.

Eventually, I swam back to the surface as the tsunami receded. But like any survivor of a disaster, I saw the world with new eyes, wary, weary.

Those of us who write here regularly have been at this grief business for several years. We know that grief hits differently earlier on - there’s no real tsunami because it’s just a constant drowning in ever-turbulent waters. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say it’s all tsunami all the time. We’d love to feature more writing from parents who are not as ‘seasoned’ as us, so that the brand new parents who find us by googling “my baby died” can see they are not alone. We know it helps to see what six years, or ten years, or thirteen years, feels like, but we also know how much people need to see they are not alone where they are at. If you have a piece of writing you’d like to share, we encourage you to have a look at our submission guidelines and consider submitting a guest post.