I struggle. I find myself mirroring the jovial spirits of my peers, returning their utterances of “Happy Holidays.” As I say this, I wander inside myself, an unwiilling participant of this merry time of year. Instead, I turn inwards—the Ghost of Christmas Past, trapped far back in time.
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Your sister died but you became a big brother nevertheless, and I can see you itching to fulfil that role. If only you knew how much I want you to experience the healing that would come with a brand-new life. Sometimes when we talk about babies I will put my hand protectively over my lower belly but I don’t tell you about the changes going on inside. You don’t need to know how often our babies die, you don’t need to share my fear. So I just hug you and tell you that I would also like to have another baby, very much, and that I hope it will someday happen for us.
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It is a box really, if you ask me. Nailed on four sides, it could be a coffin, except I cannot lie dead in one. Too real. And not true. Instead, I live, dead, stuck in a box, breathing sixteen millimeters of stale, dark air. Some days it feels like a trap, a tricky contraption, carefully designed to stifle me, slowly, painfully, and yes, alive. Other days, it stands empty like a junction, a stop sign, where I paused, before my life took a very wrong turn.
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We are so many different things. We are happiness, sadness, madness, brokenness. All these things make us, complete us. I wouldn't want to erase any happy memories of my life with my husband or my living son. Why would I want to erase the only memories I have of my daughter?
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No one here wants a rousing speech. Or maybe you do. I don’t know. We do not speak a common language, or share common customs. We hold different politics, different faiths, different aesthetics. We are connected, but only nominally. In reality, 'babylost' covers an extraordinary diversity of experience. There are so many ways for babies to die. It still shocks me.
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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