Birthdays
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I’m turning 38. You should be playing at the park with your cousins, learning to ride a bike.
I’m turning 40. You should be starting first grade.
I’m turning 50. You might have been falling in love, staying out late.
What's your pleasure?
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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 MoreLike a ship
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We spent months carefully curating a birth playlist, each song imbued with meaning, hopes, future plans communicated through song. Each one was a specially chosen message to my baby, my way of expressing my visions of our love. They were mostly joyful songs about the promise of a life about to unfold, as I anticipated seeing the world anew through her eyes. Music was a way to express a feeling that transcended words.
Read MoreA family calculus
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Each day since Olivia died, I’ve considered what it means to be a parent to a child no one else can see. Even I can only see her in my mind, but she’s there, the primary variable in our family calculus. No matter how many more children I have, the number people see – the number I see – will be n-1. Always missing one.
Read MoreHeavenly bodies
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Inevitably, each spring as the rains bring greenery to the brownish hills, I feel it in my body before I know it in my mind. I will soon return to the closest point of my orbit. I feel her warmth on my skin more intensely than before. The orange poppies that bloomed in the sidewalk cracks and medians when she was born are pushing into view.
Read MoreThis is a chain letter
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This is a chain letter. It was started at the beginning of time by the first person whose baby died, when they met the second person whose baby died, and by sharing their grief and sorrow, both the sender and the recipient felt less alone.