Where I am right now

Where 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.

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Threads of sorrow, threads of hope

Threads 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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Year ten

Year ten

Ten years later, I still feel an excess of unspent love—there is no place to put it, aside from into the air around me, along with the wishing, the longing, the dream of him. I still play with the active designing of my own afterlife: I die an old woman and revert to my 34 year-old self. I enter into a room and see Liam waking up clammy, whole, and gurgling in a crib. This is my daydream, my most divine and deepest regret spun into active language, a positive state. It’s different now. I can love him, forgive myself, and breathe.

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