What is left to say
/The words and tears dry up. It really is like a wound, healing. For days, months, years, I walked around with an open, oozing sore, yelling my pain, unable to be comfortable, making a mess. And then – slowly – the skin grew back.
Read MoreTen
/Yes! Yes, I think. We need different words – a new language – to say what or who you were. You never breathed air. You were never that kind of baby. When I’ve pictured you, you’ve never been a baby, in fact; you are always a girl, but because I never got to know what girl you’d become, the shape of you just slips away, again and again.
Read MoreWhere I am right now
/One year, Angie started a project she called “Right Where I Am,” which was a prompt to babylost parents to write about where they were right now, in the present of their grief. With parents writing from all stages of grieving, from maybe just a few days out to years and years out, the project was “like a map on the road of grief.” Importantly, the project also aimed to acknowledge that wherever you are right now in your grief, “it is right.” In the accumulation of writing about the right now of grief that rightness really became apparent: wherever you are right now is right for you because there is no other way to do grief but your own way and we are all moving in and around and through grief however we can and need to.
Read MoreDates
/If this was my reality, I wouldn’t need to remember the dates when our medical team failed her, the dates I used to punish myself for not knowing she needed me most and demanded more from the medical staff. If this was my reality those dates would have fallen out of the palm of my hand the moment she was born alive as new dates filled my mind.
Read MoreThreads of sorrow, threads of hope
/And so I folded back the meticulously knitted arms – barely bigger than my thumb – and tucked under the hood with the twin minute functional drawstrings. And I gingerly placed that little woolen packet of broken-hearted yearning in a barren drawer in our vacant nursery, praying I’d have reason, someday, to take it out again.
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