Chimera
/
my body absorbed pieces of her
as carefully and instinctively as my soul did
it’s as lovely as she was lovely
Trauma and the odds
/
And anyway, those of you reading here will know: it’s not the numbers that matter anymore. Now that it’s been you, you know it’s always someone, that there’s a person behind those numbers, and hey, why shouldn’t it be you? I feel like I was trained, somehow, to imagine that it would always be someone else, that there was no reason it would be me. I think in 2023 we call that toxic positivity.
Read MoreStill losing
/
And this is the part that only another loss parent can ever understand: That no matter how much joy you find, no matter how much pain you channel into change, no matter how much love you find in their siblings or in the incredible friends they have brought to your life, it is never enough. It can never be enough.
She is not replaceable.
Read MoreCorners
/
They showed us a lot of containers, a dozen maybe, or maybe two dozen, but only two were sized for you. I remember that the others were made of wood and metal and stone and ceramic. Nothing specific. They all flashed by too fast to leave a mark, anything clear at least. Just underexposed, shapeless ghosts against the burned-in background of the display wall. They showed us all of the containers even though they knew we only needed to see the small ones.
Read MoreWhat's your pleasure?
/
I tend to chafe at anything I perceive as an attempt to silence my grief or force me to perform happiness. But here among other babylost parents, I am tiptoeing out of the dark barroom to ask, what if I don’t spend the rest of my life crying with the curtains drawn? Is that a betrayal of my daughter? Or the opposite?
Read More