glass words

I am so honored to welcome this month's guest writer. Merry's support and love permeates all the nooks and crannies of this community.  Merry describes herself as a "38 year old mother of four girls who came before and then Freddie who was born and didn't breathe but then did and lived for eleven days in SCBU before dying of pneumonia. In January this year we had Ben, our rainbow baby born 21 months after Freddie died." Merry writes at Patch of Puddles.

When I say the words, they remind me of the twinkling, polished nuggets of pretty glass that surround his memorial tree. Smooth, splendid, finished, perfect.

"He's their second brother. We had another little boy but he died when he was very young."

"They did have another brother but we didn't get to bring him home."

"We had another one who spent some time in SCBU. No, he didn't come home unfortunately."

"I've had six children... I have five children."

"He is number six. I have four girls at home."

Sometimes I phrase it so I don't have to say the words. Their brother died. My baby died. Our son died.

I've perfected the words so they skitter around like handfuls of decorative glass pebbles held high and dropped, bouncing in the sunlight.

photo by dalvenjah.

I'm guilty of an art of careful word architecture that parcels up our family pain and speaks it in a way that acknowledges but protects. I sometimes worry I phrase it in a way that make people think we weren't allowed to keep him rather than had him brutally taken. By the time I spit those artfully shaped words out they have been shaped to make them glisten and slide from my lips, not rip . I'm guilty of trying to make it palatable. I worry people think it means I have got over it.

I worry he hears.

+++

The world at large says words back at me that my world in miniature says politely.

"At least you have the others."

"The girls must have helped you get through."

"Thank goodness you didn't have to bring him home for a while. At least you never got to know him before he died."

As if the eleven days bent over his cot, praying to every god I don't believe in to grant a miracle didn't count. As if having four healthy children makes a difference to the pain of losing one. As if, at the birth of a good to go child, someone could say "Do you mind if we keep him and you just pop off home?" and the answer would be "Well of course, it's not like I know him yet!" As if, knowing his sisters, loving them deeply, makes his loss more bearable and not the yawning, gripping pain of knowing exactly how wonderful and beautiful a person we lost.

"It must be so much easier to cope with losing Freddie now that you have Ben."

Out pops a pebble, a shiny glass pebble.

"Yes, it helps. Of course it helps." Treading a path neatly between the socially acceptable and my listening daughters hearing and thinking he became expendable and forgotten. I break my teeth on another palatable pebble.

+++

It's because of my daughters that I had to give up fighting for Freddie. With disability and long term care looming hard and fast, I vomited up the words that we had to let him go. Losing him was not better because we had living children, it was made bitter and bile filled by the knowledge that I could ruin six lives by fighting for him or let him go and save us all.

"It's time to stop."

There was nothing polished about those words, they were molten and then jagged and my cheeks and tongue and throat are throbbing and scarring still.

Don't let anyone tell you that having other children makes it better. Different, but not better.

+++

Just 30 minutes holding the body of my son without wire or tubes.

With the image of my frightened and barely whole children waiting for news burned into my head, I watched my son die, packed my bag and went home to comfort them, to break the news, thank the people who cared for them - and have lunch.

Home to an eleven year old standing at the top of the stairs and sobbing "Is he dead? It's not fair."

Home to a ten year old who took one look at our faces and turned and walked away, the brother she had longed for gone before she ever held him. She never let herself cry.

Home to a seven year old who screamed "You shouldn't have had him! You had too many children already! Have other one now!"

Home to a five year old already shattered to pieces by her parents having been absent for eleven days, who had kissed the bump every night and made him a space in her heart and loved him as only a five year old can and who sat in our arms and seemed to understand and two hours later asked when we would go to get him and bring him home.

Who asked repeatedly, "Is he still alive really?"

All our grief, laid out and raw in the faces of the children we loved. Our children dragged through the splintering, wounding carnage alongside us.

My children, crumpled and bewildered and somehow supposed to filled the gaping hole in my heart, who listened and watched my every move, weighed up my love, weighed up my grief, looked to see if I would last. Looked to see if I could still be mummy.

Home to gymnastics sessions and maths that needed doing and laundry and presents waiting to be given to a new baby brother. I spent the first night after his death not in my bed and my husbands arms, but on a mattress on the floor of a pink bedroom, each of us with shell shocked girl lying either side of us. There was no hiding in a darkened room for me. There was no going to pieces. The greatest betrayal was that we had to put Freddie neatly away ourselves and carry on - go forward - to keep our living children safe.

Life goes on.

Don't let anyone tell you it makes it okay if the babylost have other children.

Sometimes what hurts most of all is accepting I was one of the luckiest of the unlucky people. That my pain is a little more bearable because of my children. But that my pain is magnified ten thousandfold by seeing them hurt.

+++

When I think I can't be any more sad, I hear them speaking pebbles. Polished, perfect pebbles that drop and scatter as they dance the linguistic dance of having two brothers but only one that anyone can see.

That is a special kind of heartbreak.

Look what I did to my children. I wanted another baby, who died, and I made my children learn to speak the language of the grief stricken. I daren't look inside their mouths. I am too frightened to see if there are scars from the glass. I'm horrified, but happier, to see the pebbles.

How do you use word architecture when speaking to others about your child's (or children's) death? Is there one phrase you use consistently? Do you use different words or phrases depending on if you are talking to a stranger, the casual acquaintance, close friend or family member? If you have older children, how to teach them to talk of their sibling's death? Do you overhear them mirroring your words?  What kinds of things do you overhear them saying about death and grief and their family since the death of their sibling?

To The Pain

I don't have a picture of Silas handy.  I know I can go to my blog and look at the photo we have posted there, and we have a framed memorial with his image and footprint and handprint and a photo of his name in the sand.  In the drawer next to my bed, I keep his ashes in a small orange jar with a cork in the top.  Lu got it for me for other reasons years ago, but when we needed to transport a portion of his remaining physical form to the memorial site in the park up the street, that's what I had and that's what I used, and that's where I keep that part of him.

I have a tattoo on my arm that is the most present aspect of Silas in my life.  Like him it is part of me, forever.

The ink in my skin has become the perfect metaphor of my mental picture of him.  Long ago he ceased to be a person and transformed into a force.  His energy blows at my soul and turns in me in ways I never expected.  All these years later and I can feel his brief life exerting its pressure on my heart, my consciousness, my view of the world.

The exact same white EMT truck just blew past my window as loud and terrifying as the day he was born. I dread where it is going.  That is Silas as real and true as anything I can conjure.

When I hear of a new pregnancy, when I see women round with life, when someone unknowing tells me about plans for the perfect birth experience I feel Silas in my nervous system.  My thoughts and memories and ideas of "him" are transcribed into the way I feel the world in a terrible, tangible, painful way.  And I love it.

Those sensations: the feel of the tattoo under my skin, my terror for those beautiful mothers-to-hopefully-be, the raw reality of a toddler boy exactly his age, I need them.

Silas can't be anything for me himself.  He doesn't have the voice to speak to me about his needs and wants, doesn't have the face to draw my gaze and steal my heart.  I don't know anything about who he would have been, but I can feel in those grievous sensations all the hopes and expectations I had for both of us, and I love them.  After all, those brutal sensations are all I have to keep my connection to the son I never knew.  Funny huh?  No, not really but no one else gets how fucked up this all gets besides us, the ones that are in the midst of this furnace that never stops burning.

We aim to have a Glow here in the Woods, for people to find when they are lost.  The part we don't often mention is that we don't just use this fire for light and warmth.  We use it to sear our souls over and over again, to touch the pain and drink it deep.  When I saw his ashes in my drawer only moments ago while looking for some random object it generated a sensation in my body that few people know.

This, this is what I have.  This is the most and all that I have.  This is more than what I have because his ashes are years older than he ever was.  That little jar.  That little life.  The wrongness of a life snapped off so short is gut-wrenching and violently wrong, and that's my life, his life.  So the sound that came out of my face wasn't a laugh or a grunt or a groan, but something all the way in between.  It was a guttural acknowledgement of how fucking awful life can be, and how much I miss his life never-to-be, and how little I can do about any of it.

I don't have him or a picture of him handy, but I have so much more of him in and with and around me than anyone would ever know.  My grief for his lost life burns bright in my soul and I love hating how much it hurts.  I step right up to the moments when it hurts the most because that's how I can feel him in the most visceral, literal way.  His absence burns me to a crisp, and I relish in the charred memories and the hopes made of smoke and tears.

How do deal with the pain when your lost child or children is suddenly present in your life?  Do you seek out experiences that will hurt, in order to feel them close?  Do you grieve in secret, special, private ways?  How has your view of grief and pain changed?

ghost town

I lost my daughter then I lost my friends. Not simply lost them. It was more like they drove me out into the country and told me to go run out in the woods for a while, they waited by the car.

"There, Angie, check out behind that big tree. A little further away. There is something shiny there. It is the internet and there are people on there whose babies died too."

"Over here? I don't see it."

"Just a little further. Go on now. Be good. I loved you once."

"Okay. I love you too."

And I watched their license plate become illegible in the distance. I walked back to town, determined to understand, only to find that they moved without a forwarding address. So, I suppose, they lost me.

photo by Denise ~*~.

Villages of friends were gone. I walk into the ghost towns of my past, sidle up to the bar. There is nothing left. I am not part of their tribe any longer. I slam the empty bottle of the long bar. They were drinking buddies, after all, not friends. For years, it made me angry. It made me angry that my daughter died and then I kept losing more and more and more until it was just me.

When it was just me, I saw you. And you. And you. And you. And you is beautiful and amazing. I told you all about the pain of losing friendships, and my daughter, and raising a daughter and every little thing about this experience. I listened to you talk about it too. We suddenly had a little boom town of the babylost. I felt normal.

Normal was all I ever wanted.

+++

Everything about my life changed after Lucia died, even though it looked exactly the same. And I feel attached to all those things I once was, like grape vines winding around the withered parts of me--my arrogance, my lightness of being, my inappropriate anger, my bravado, my aloofness, my old friendships, the confidence I had in my body. I cut the shoots, understanding that those bits of me are dead, but the tentacles grow back, clutching dearly again to something already gone. (I fear it takes the nutrients of my thriving, beautiful bits.)

In the weeks after, it became abundantly clear that I had no idea how to feel anything but anger and longing about her death. I was not emotionally equipped to handle the death of my daughter, except I had to handle it. It was awkward and painful. I clumsily talked to people, until I just couldn't do it anymore. I drank heavily. I watched the same safe comedies over and over. I was afraid to call friends and cry. I thought I would never stop--hysterical, uncontrolled tears. Keening. Misplaced anger. Blame. Fear. Blubbering. I heard the conversation before I uttered a word.

If I say I want to die now, you won't understand. You will think I am suicidal. You will call the authorities. You will take my only living child. I just don't know how to live this life without her. I don't know how to shop for groceries now that she is dead. I don't know how to make small talk. I don't know how to watch Law & Order. I don't know how to do anything.

And so, thinking they understood that about me, I expected them to call me. Surely someone calling a grieving mother would know what they signed up for if they called. It felt rude to call someone, even a very good friend, just to cry, even though, ironically, I longed for someone to call me in the early months and cry. I just wanted to be needed, not underestimated. I had once a month calls from a few friends, which were like tall cool glasses of water in a drought. I never cried during those conversations. I was almost maniacally positive about how fine I was doing. Then those petered away too. Mostly, it was silence broken by long, drunken tirade emails. 

Left to my own devices, I behaved badly. Oh, I behaved graciously here and there, but mostly I was angry, chaotic, impulsive, and afraid, lashing out at unsuspecting strangers in markets and yoga studios. The crying stopped eventually. The misplaced anger at other people slowed. I quit drinking. I figured out how to shop, and chitchat, and watch crime dramas. I learned how to feel all the emotions of grief, not just the loudest ones. I went to baby showers, and parties, and stopped expecting, or wanting, anything Lucia-related to be discussed. That took time, but it happened. The grief fog lifted. 

Being the me I was and grieving was fucking torture. So I changed stuff about me, like who I trust and when I trust and what I trust and how much I trust. I changed what I give and what I take and what I give personally and what I take personally. I changed what I complain about and what I don't.

I couldn't call those old friends after I changed. I didn't know what to say to them anymore. I wasn't over her death. I would never be over her death. But I learned to live with it. Time had moved forward. I moved forward. They moved forward. I missed so much, and they missed so much. Not many people stepped up. Those that did, stepped away eventually. I never called them to ask about the thing I should have been asking about--birthdays, illnesses, new jobs, old jobs, pets, boyfriends, girlfriends, new babies. When I came to fully understand that my daughter was never coming back, I came to understand that neither were my friends. I don't blame them anymore. I was a terrible friend--grieving and overly sensitive, impetuous and distant. I didn't and still do not understand how I could have been any better. I did the absolute best I could with who I was. Emotionally, I was stunted and small. And maybe they were too.

+++

I wrote because I didn't know what else to do with this ache in me. I couldn't speak it to my closest friends, so I wrote her birth story. I posted it on the internet. I thought that was everything I knew about her. I put it on a blog. Maybe someone will read it, maybe someone will understand. It was a flare shot into the night. Or a campfire, as we say around here.

Then I wrote about going to the market. Suddenly, people were there. Other grieving parents. I read about tears in the produce department. I wrote about my fears and anxieties and loves and revelations. I wrote like no one but babylost folk were reading, and sometimes, I wrote like they weren't even reading. I wrote with a kind of freedom that is both naive and slightly endearing. I found myself in the community I longed for since birth--supportive, honest, loving, compassionate. I made friends who appreciated my dark side, as well as the other parts of me. And I theirs. I had found normal.

Writing publicly about grief and pain and the darker parts of losing your child remains both incredibly comforting and absolutely terrifying. In most of my friendships that ended, the complaints centered around my blog and writing. My friends didn't like grieving, complaining, sad, disappointed Angie. 

You wrote about the friends! How unforgivable! You made it sound like we are terrible people! You write about your dead baby every week! That's too much! You make art and sell it! It is about the death of your baby! How terrible! How gauche! Everyone is sick of everything BABYLOST! It is unhealthy! It is wrong! We can't have it!

I never expected any friends to read my blog. It had nothing to offer them. It certainly had nothing to offer me for them to read my innermost, ugliest thoughts about the death of my daughter. I never imagined they would read, but they did.

I wrote because I had no idea what else to do. I wrote because my friends didn't call, and I couldn't call them. I wrote because I needed a community, to feel normal, to feel worthy of compassion. But it came with a steep price. 

Because I lost Lucia, I found something of myself tangled in the tumbleweeds of my emotional and physical defects. After everyone left, something dark and ego-filled, sensitive and critical, drunk and capable of sobriety, redemption, and forgiveness emerged. I forgive those friends, not because they have made amends, but because I have. I had to forgive my humanness. In doing that, I had to forgive theirs. I was grieving the death of my daughter. I did the best I could, and so did they. I sit with who I am now, a human being worthy of compassion. You taught me that. Thank you.

How have your friendships been affected since the death of your baby(ies)? Do you have a blog, or on-line presence? Do your before-friends know about your on-line community of babylost? Do they read your blog, or participate in your forums? How do they feel about it? How have you felt about being public, or not so public? Anonymous? 

Indelible

Who are we, now? Are we still ourselves, the people other people know, except, you know, grieving? Or are we changed forever, marked in a way that changes who we are fundamentally? Is there a middle path, a third option? I'd like to think there is, mostly because that is how I feel-- I am still me, but I am also marked.

I've often wanted to be marked in a physical sense too. To underscore, I guess. Sometimes also so that others could see-- though this desire is much less prominent these days, I've also from time to time wanted to make sure that others couldn't ignore my son. And a physical mark would probably make that somewhat harder to do. There are always the irreverent t-shirts, ones we've all fantasized about making and wearing. But fun as those would be, they are not permanent, and not exactly changes to our physical self.

This is likely why I am always at rapt attention when bereaved parents discuss their memorial tattoos. Some of these are true works of art, with layers of meaning and images in images. I wish I had the creativity to design something like this. But even then, I am so culturally conditioned not to get a tattoo myself (it's kind of a big Jewish deal, concentration camps and all) that I can't imagine breaking with that. So I admire the heartbreakingly beautiful work of others, and I think about how you really need to know the story already to see the entire story in the image. Which means that these are really for the parent, and not so much for the passers by.

So my body remains unchanged, except for what life does to it. And yet, I feel changed, I feel marked. I realize, too, that some of these changes are about my part of the story, and some are about A's, or rather about me reacting to his part. For example, the way pregnancy after is different, that's about me. That part is about what it feels like to be a mother whose child, whose baby, dies. And who then chooses to chance the fear and the anxiety and all the attendant crazy in hopes that another child might live.

On the other hand, the fact that I can't make myself fill out the part of my online profile with a cool local toy store that asks for children's birthdays because it numbers said children? That, I believe, is about him. It's about me knowing in my bones that he was here, and so I can't list the son who was born after him as "child 2." But at the same time I can't very well list the birthday of a dead kid under "child 2," not least of all because the store will then send me gift suggestions for him based on the age he should be for his birthday and various commonly celebrated holidays. And that? Might just break my heart.

So I am changed. But am I marked? Recently, I've come to believe that I am. Not in a way that others can see easily. The most striking of these little internal markings is the reaction I have to a very everyday thing-- supermarkets. Some of the food stores where I shop have flower sections right by the door. And I noticed that every time my eye falls on the fresh cut bounty, the first thought, and I mean the very first thought that enters my mind is essentially about which of the bunches on display I could take to the cemetery. This is more than five years later, so I think it's safe to say that this is not a passing thing. It is, in fact, so much a part of me now, so much not out of the ordinary for me, that it took me all this time just to notice. And I don't even go to the cemetery much now, so I think of choosing flowers much more than I actually do that.

When I did notice, it made me feel only a little sad. Mostly, mostly I think I was and am glad to have this. This change is no less indelible than the tattoo ink, even if less obvious to anyone else. In a weird way it's just nice to know that I carry my son with me all the time.

Are you marked? What are your markings and how do you feel about them? Are you glad to have them? Or would you rather not step on grief land mines as you navigate life?

slow

I move slowly through the world now.  I used to rush all the time.  Always on the go ready for next next next.  Busy at work, busy with friends, I was always looking forward to whatever it was that was happening tomorrow or next week or next month.  Throughout Lu's pregnancy I had my gaze focused on the end result, on having our child in our arms and the whole rest of our lives to get started, finally.

Her water broke, the mid-wives arrived, the longest night of my life started, and all I wanted was for it to be over and our child to arrive.

What I would give to go back to that night and tell the me that no longer exists what was going to happen, and what I had to do to fix it.

To the hospital, now, I would tell me.  Fuck the supposed knowledge and experience of those terrible mid-wives.  Fuck their surety, how certain they were that it would all be fine.  Fuck the protestations of my wife who would not have wanted to go at first.  Fuck all of that.  To the hospital where we should have been the whole time I would have insisted and none would have stood in our way.  The me-then that was terrified and the me-now that is shattered, Lu too, together we might have had a chance. Silas might have had a chance.  Instead dawn broke and he still hadn't arrived until finally in the afternoon they had to drag him out of her, bloody, blue and not breathing at all.

Suddenly we couldn't go fast enough.  The ambulance couldn't arrive quickly enough.  We couldn't get to the hospital in time.  We raced and raced but it was far too late, he was gone gone gone. Everything I wanted and waited for smashed to pieces in a single afternoon, as though the Universe itself had just dropped an infinitely dense and heavy brick directly on my soul.

Now, I go slow.  The stress and pressure I used to thrive on now makes me incredibly anxious and uncomfortable.  It started right away.  As we lay splayed out and shattered by grief and loss, all I could do was take it moment my moment.  After a few days I began to be able to think an hour or two into the future.  As in, maybe I'll eat something... later.  Eventually, after many months of paralyzing sadness, I re-learned how to last a day and take the next as it came.  Tomorrow I'll shower, I'd think, and then fell an immense sense of accomplishment when I achieved that lofty goal.

When I finally started working again I quickly realized that the way I used to do things was no longer appropriate.  I used to finish things just-in-time, but when I tried to do that again I found myself shaking with stress, palms sweaty, and my mind in turmoil as I tried to prioritize and execute what needed to be done.  After several near-panic attacks, I learned I no longer functioned that way.  So I stopped trying.  Silas's death taught me that time will not wait, and if you don't have enough of it to get something done right, you're not going to get any more.

So it's slow how I go, now.  Slow to rise from bed, slow to eat, slow steps through another day without Silas at my side.  He's inside me only, now.  Transferred in death from inside Lu only, beautifully, to inside both of us, terribly.  Inside me are the memories of my hopes for him;  the expectations of what being his father would be like;  the shape and feel of the world that I would have lived in, if he lived in it, too.

I take my time because I experience time differently than I did before Silas died.  Because now I know all to well that we only get one chance to experience each moment in time, and if you miss it or do it wrong or forget what you're about, it is gone gone gone, never to return.

I've come to hate rushing.  Whenever I have to rush to do anything, I feel an echo of that day when we couldn't rush enough, couldn't stop time, couldn't turn things back, couldn't hold on to what was vanishing before our eyes.  We rushed after our hope, our love, our son, and we couldn't catch up to him no matter how fast we went.

So now I go slow and try to get it right.  I couldn't survive another terrible, monumental mistake like losing Silas.  Better to tread carefully, watch closely, savor what I have right in front of me and never for a second expect the Universe to take up the slack when I fuck things up.  But no matter how slow I go, I can never go slow enough to turn it back, to save Silas, to change that terrible day.  

Time pushes me forward away from him, forcing me to face every new day with a shadow across my heart cast by the absence of my son, his tiny features etched in my mind: perfect, beautiful and timeless.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

How did the death of your child or children transform your sense of time?  Do you think about time differently now?  If years have passed since you child died, has time changed in the intervening years?  If you could go back in time would you be able to change what happened? Would you want to?

Zoë, reimagined

The first in our series of monthly guest posts submitted by Glow readers. Robynne's daughter, Zoë, was stillborn at full-term last July. Zoë was her first child. We are so grateful for her words and perspective. --Angie

In my dreams, you are alive. It is a trick my imagination plays.  Like when I was carefully putting away your baby things, sorting what to keep and what to return.  I held a toy in one hand, and said aloud, "I think I'll save this one for Zoë."  My mind just couldn't wrap itself around a future without you, around the idea of a child that would someday play with your toys and would not be you.  It is still a future that makes no sense to me, just as the present now lacks the logical outcome of my healthy, full-term pregnancy.  I have the baby weight, and the silvery stretch marks, the insomnia, and the instincts of a new mama, but I am missing the most essential piece of this puzzle that I started long before your arrival.

I dream that I go to the hospital where I delivered my daughter, and they give me her body, wrapped in blankets. I decide to take her home because I want her with me. Suddenly, she wakes up...she is alive! I am so happy; I want to show her to everyone. I can hardly believe the miracle that has happened. She is just as I remember her - beautiful, perfect. She speaks to me, almost telepathically, telling me things I need to know. Her words touch the deepest places in me, and I wake up crying in the dark. 

Nine months.  You would be nine months old now.  How have I come this far?  The books say you would be playing with sounds, syllables, even "ma-ma," the two-syllable word I long to hear most.  You wouldn't quite be talking in full sentences as you did in my dream, but you might repeat things after me, and copy my facial expressions.  The other day, I saw a photo of my friend's little boy, born the same day you were.  He was sitting in the bathtub with a huge smile on his face.  He looks more like his mother now, and has lost the look of "newbornness" and taken on infancy.  I cannot believe you would be this size, that you would be smiling at me in pictures and growing into yourself.

I dream that Zoë has grown suddenly from a newborn to a little girl of 5 or 6. She runs around the house screaming with laughter as I pretend to chase her. It is bedtime, and she needs to put her pajamas on. It is her birthday. I catch her and tickle her feet, and then kiss them. "I love you so much!" I tell her. I never want this dream to be over. I play it over and over for days, never wanting to forget the sound of my daughter's laughter. 

I want to believe that these dreams are more than dreams. I want to believe that somehow in sleep the part of me that cannot grasp other realities falls away, and that you are alive and laughing in a place where time dances easily between childhood and infancy.  I want to believe that there is more to this world than what I can see here, in front of me.  I watch a TV show that follows a medium through her day-to-day life, giving people messages from their deceased loved ones.  She reads mothers who have lost children, and assures them that their babies are with them all the time. I want to feel such confidence, to know that you are out there, that you can hear me when I tell you how much I love you and miss you.

I dream of the grief I have over the relationship I lost with my daughter, the connection I felt with her and all it opened in me.  Emotion fills the dream, eclipses any scene or series of events.  I remember it only as a knowing, and a sense of my loss.  Then, in the dream, I am told that I still have this connection with Zoë, but that it can only be like this, in dreams. 

I do not know much of anything anymore.  I find that the ideas I had about life, about religion and spirituality, about things beyond or unseen, have all been scattered and broken open to reveal a deep sense of unknowing.  A realization of how little I have been designed to comprehend.  A sense of humility about what I am meant to know, and see, and understand.  If there is a God, I am like the blindfolded men around an elephant, trying to describe it, and thinking it is a trunk, or a tail, or a rump because that is all I can feel at the moment.  I do not know where you are now - if you are in heaven, or in my dreams, or if Nature just took you back and you became a part of everything.  But I know that you were here.  I did not imagine you.  I know that my love for you is immense, and infinite, and all-encompassing.  I know that you are my daughter, and I will always be your mama.

--Robynne

 +++

Do you dream of your baby or babies? Do you dream of grief? What kinds of dreams do you have?