Completely incomplete

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Completely incomplete

A baby entered my home for the first time, but she wasn't mine. My son watched the baby tentatively, and finally went over to say hello. Uncertain of how to greet her, he waved. He was fascinated by her tiny fingers and toes, miniature in comparison to his own. All the while, I was fascinated by his bravery, strength, and resilience. He was thinking about his lost sister, the one he never met. The one he often longs for. He handled this other baby, his cousin, so well. So did I. If he could handle it, so could I.

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"Our baby died yesterday. Please help us..."

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"Our baby died yesterday. Please help us..."

We are strangers to one another. You arrived to me through a website in a series of zeroes and ones. But we are space travellers connected forever by shared astrophysics. I was once pulled apart into a drifting cloud of atoms and molecules. Like oil in a dish, my specks magnetically drew to one another over what felt like millennia until there were enough atoms and molecules for an arm, a kidney, an ear, until I was myself again.

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Common ground

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Common ground

Hiding in a dark was the final step of my poorly executed plan. Avoidance. Protection. Head down. It will be over soon. In an hour, we can all just move on and forget about it. But I couldn’t let it go. The notion that my absence would be noted, that the assumptions others made would be wrong. There are coworkers who have made no mention of my daughter, despite the pictures and stillbirth research fundraising flyers, her name written all over my office. Even from the ones that know of all three of my children, I lack the confidence in their ability to consider my past in the context of the present.

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