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.
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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.
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I think about how much I love this kid already, the nibling I’ve hoped for for so long, another baby in the family, and I think about how I have - how we all have - six months now. Six months of waiting. Six months of hoping. Six months of this buzzing that is excitement and anxiety. ‘Stay alive, baby,’ I can hear my heart urging as I tuck the kids in, brush my teeth, lay my own head down. ‘Stay alive, baby. Stay alive, baby.’
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The snail carries its home on its back and keeps growing that home as it needs to, though I like to imagine it can, like a hermit crab, discard one home for another when the first just won’t do. A falling star, like the one I saw above the mountains on the night you left us, shoots off into the atmosphere and burns itself off. Where have you gone, little one? Where did you find to make your home, alone, in the wilds, without me?
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Anja doesn’t need me. She requires nothing. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that the world I live in doesn’t recognize what she needs, doesn’t acknowledge – and so doesn’t allow space for – the ways I should attend to her. My care is spread thin.
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
: ttc | pregnancy | birth after loss
: not ttc | infertility after loss
: parenting after loss
: on the bookshelf
: how to stop lactation when there is no baby
: how to help a friend through babyloss
: how to plan a baby's funeral
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