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 MoreLittle missives from beyond time and space
Afloat on currents of molecules, suspended in the gaseous elements…?
Too fanciful, I think, too cute. Too good to be true.
I find myself listening for them, though, despite my better judgment,
On the off chance, that maybe, just maybe, there’s something there.
This was the least trivial of things, and yet, the outrage just didn’t boil up inside me the way I would have expected…
…at first.
But then, slowly, as my bruised and bleeding heart started to heal, it started to peek its head out every now and again. And then when I got pregnant once more – when again I had something to lose – it came roaring back with a vengeance.
Read MoreBut when the ornaments with her name on them began to show up in the mail, we decided that we would get a tree after all. And we would hang them, and her stocking.
And I would capture this on video, for some reason.
Looking back, I think, perhaps, I needed some solid proof that this nightmare was actually happening.
He sits with me in my stiflng pain, silently, faithfully, patiently. He makes himself comfortable on her changing pad beside the crib – the one he knew better than to even consider laying a toe on while she was alive, but immediately staked a claim to the very first day we were back in our home after her death – and settles in for as long as I need to mourn.
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.
Read MoreBereaved parents of lost babies and potential of all kinds: come here to share the technicolour, the vividness, the despair, the heart-broken-open, the compassion, and the other side of getting through this mess called grief.
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Parents of lost babies and potential of all kinds: come here to share the technicolour, the vividness, the despair, the heart-broken-open, the compassion we learn for others, having been through this mess — and see it reflected back at you, acknowledged and understood.
Thanks to photographer Xin Li and to artist Stephanie Sicore for their respective illustrations and photos.
: for one and all
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: parenting after loss
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