turn and face the strange

you haven't changed a bit, she effuses, intuiting this wisdom from a superficial eight-second conversation in the grocery aisle amidst the turnips.

i swallow a flippant reply.  i haven't seen her in, like, nineteen years, maybe since high school graduation.  i recall the picture of she and i at prom, casual friends: in said photo, i am wearing a pastel floral puff-sleeved dress in which i resemble a large Laura Ashley sofa, and my hair is braided on top of my head like Heidi of the Swiss Alps.  my shoes have bows on them and my eyebrows are as fluffy and thick as a caterpillar.   haven't changed?  haven't changed?  oh god, old girl...shut your mouth, that's crazy talk.

i understand that my once-upon-an-acquaintance was merely being polite.  she wasn't trying to suggest that i haven't grown, or grown up, or that i look like a refugee from 1989.  but her comment still spawned in me a bizarre and powerful urge to strip my clothes off right there amongst the root vegetables and the happy shoppers and force her to see my scars, acknowledge them...all the years and the wrinkles and the sorrows, all that life has wrought on me and me on myself.   i wanted to shake those raw, scabbed beauties in her placid face, shock her with them, own them.  at least, erm, figuratively.

it's been a couple of months since i had that conversation.  in the interim, i've wondered at the vehemence of my reaction.  it most definitely stemmed from my grief, however far along the healing path i may think i am.  and it reflects, i think, a process of integrating grief into my own identity.  in the early months after Finn died, all i longed for - on those rare occasions that i subjected myself to random interactions at all - was to "pass" as normal.  had some aged cheerleader told me then that i hadn't changed, i would have preened, i think, at a performance gone right...and then darted back to the sanctuary of home to nurse the raw wound that was my reality.  later still, i just longed not to be reminded publicly of said wound at all; hated to be exposed in my grief in any circumstances not under my control (ie, any circumstances outside my own blog, basically).

but then i guess i internalized it.  i accepted it, and came to terms with it, and became able to speak it, and became accustomed to it as a part of me.  and that has been good.  bringing my grief out into the light has, for the most part, shrivelled its power to wound me, and allowed me to become some version of whole again.

but i'm not the same as i was before.  as i was not the same after any of the other great upheavals/sorrows/betrayals of fate that have sporadically marked me since that hideous prom picture was taken.  as i was not the same after i fell in love for the first time, not the same after i brought home my living son and discovered the strange half-life joy of sleep deprivation.  life changes us, the best and worst things the most deeply.  i think that needs to be honoured, though not necessarily in grocery store aisles.  and yet i wonder if i've integrated grief too much into my sense of self?  if it's normal to react so fiercely to someone's passing comment that i haven't changed?  if it's healthy to have integrated grief and scarring so much into my identity that i'm offended when someone - even innocently - tries to pretend it's not there?

i don't want to go back to the person i was before Finn.  i'm not sure i ever did, even in the worst of it:  hell, i was not so carefree even before, and in his short life he taught me and brought me things i will keep close to me all of my days.  but as i've healed, i've become more attached to that not wanting to go back, more invested in my self-identity as this tempered vessel, this patch-ridden human being.  i have become disdainful of attempts to present life as sunny and perfect, dismissive of easily-won happiness as naive, even banal.  i have also become inclined to assume that things will go wrong, particularly around pregnancy and childbirth, because my experience has repeatedly borne this out in one way or another.  i have succumbed to the hubris of believing that i am special, unlucky, marked...even though in this online world i have come to realize that i haven't lived the half of it.

i think part of this identification with loss has been a reaction designed to assert my right to space and existence in a world that often seeks to dismiss the sorrowing, bury them with their dead.  but i wonder about going too far, holding so tightly to the fact of loss that the rest of me gets subordinated to that tragedy?  is the fierce, fey compulsion to inflict my stretch marks on a bygone acquaintance at the Shop & Save an, erm, bad sign? 

do you want to be told you haven't changed a bit?

two solitudes

In that last hour, our hello and goodbye, it was Dave who cried.

I'd never really seen tears well up for him, before.  I haven't since.  Watching him cradle our son as those few salt drops slid onto Finn's blanket was one of the tenderest things I've witnessed, a benediction of fatherhood more fitting, for us, than the baptism we'd rejected.

I didn't cry.  I was too fresh from birth, too present, too amazed by this firstborn boy I hadn't known I'd always wanted, too busy trying to fit a lifetime into the minutes we had.  I sang to him, raw-voiced, petted his dark hair, gazed in wonderment at his tidy, perfect ears, his finger gripping mine.  I told him he was wanted and loved.  I whispered and hushed and said, mama's here...it's okay, little one, don't be afraid.   I knew exactly what was happening, but in that moment - small mercies of shock - it was not happening to me.  It was happening to my child, and just to be present and with him was all the mothering I was ever going to get to do and all my mind could take in.  And so, somehow, I did not cry, me who weeps at car commercials and bristles with indignant tears when the least of my feelings is trod upon.

But later I filled buckets...tears of sorrow and of rage and hopelessness.  After his death was done happening to Finn, it happened to me a thousand times in replay, all the loss and brokenness that did not touch me in the moment crowding in tenfold.  The bright yellow walls of our kitchen, painted in the first days after we returned home, have my tears in their butter hue.  The backsplash of broken tile is a mosaic created of therapeutic sessions, me and a hammer and licensed destruction that kept me, I think, from the siren song of disappearance, of hurting myself.

Dave, though, did not cry again.  He held me, weathered me, all that long summer...and all these years since, in the moments where my bitterness and hurt and grief have burbled up to the surface and unleashed tears and wounded cries.  But this has not been how he has grieved.  His sorrow seems to have no questions, no self-pity.  He went back to work five days later, because he had to and I had already lost my job, and he came home lunchtimes in those early days...mostly, I think, to make sure I wasn't hanging from the rafters. And he answered a multitude of questions about how I was doing and he listened to a multitude of secret stories that came spilling out about others' losses long since unspoken and he came home at night and we sat on the deck and I tried desperately to think of something to say to him but came up silent because I had nothing to offer but lamentations...and sometimes he seemed like a stone that I could only break myself on.

I don't think anyone ever asked me how he was.

And yet even in the worst of it, I knew we were lucky...because there was trust between us, implicit and otherwise unscarred.  Because I knew he tried hard not to judge me for how I grieved, no matter how ugly and exposed our differences made me feel.  Because I knew and did not doubt that he, too, loved our son and missed him and thought of him...even if we weren't able to find ways of speaking that aloud to each other.

But we were still two solitudes, living separate lives for a very long time, hurting - and in ways hurting each other - even while trying to comfort and build.

There is a terrible intimacy in having to share grief with someone.  Even if you both feel it deeply, you almost inevitably will not experience it all in the same ways and at the same time.  And I wonder if there isn't something about grieving that makes some small part of all of us a little like a cat who crawls off to find a corner alone to die in.  The urge for solitude, sanctuary to lick our wounds in in some form or other, seems to be almost a categorical imperative...no matter how we may share ourselves on the internet and even long for commiseration...the reality of mourning in tandem is almost always messy.  Grief exposes too much of us, makes the intimacy of eyes searching ours overwhelming.

Dave and I have come out the other side, three years later.  I can hold his gaze now and look back without flinching, without hiding, without seeing pain there or pain reflected.   There are no other eyes in the world that have shared with me what his have, and we are both healed enough now, in our own separate ways, that the bond doesn't rub raw but honours, commemorates, cements us.  I am grateful for his having been there all along, for not having had to find my way alone.  And yet I know, if I am honest, that we were alone, in the core of ourselves, stumbling along harnessed together by good faith and nothing else for much of that time.  And I catch my breath and think, damn, no wonder divorce rates are so high in the aftermath of loss like this.  And I fear to look deeper than that, because I do not want to feast my eyes upon the scars any longer.

once and again

I think I was probably well into my adolescence before I understood that the word "pregnant" could actually be spoken above a stage whisper.

When I was eighteen and groping my way blindly through the minefield of college sexuality, "pregnant" was one of the scariest words in my vocabulary.  When I was twenty-four and at my first real baby shower, traumatized by the balloons and the sorority-style squealing and those bizarre paper hats, "pregnant" felt like a word from some foreign language I couldn't fathom being fluent in.  When I was twenty-nine and in the midst of a divorce and a PCOS diagnosis, "pregnant" began to feel like a heartbreaking word, one that might slip through my fingers forever.  When I was thirty-two and the pee stick turned shockingly positive for the first time, "pregnant" became a magical incantation that I whispered to myself, secretly, almost in disbelief that such wonder had ever come to pass.

It was the next spring, at thirty-three and deep in the bone-numb grief of mourning my firstborn, that I lived all those incarnations of the word - the shameful and horrifying and foreign and heart-searing and secretly longed-for - all together, each time I encountered a ripe belly.  They echoed all the long weeks up to my due date: that could/would/should have been me. Bellies seemed to sprout up everywhere, the world a sudden minefield of them.  And each one, beautiful and poignant, full of possibility, made me gasp for breath and sent my shoulders hurtling up over my ears and my eyes skittering to the street.   To a babylost mother, there's little so evocative, so exposing and so wrenching as a healthily glowing pregnant woman, the Other, our opposite, blithely traipsing down a path that has dumped us remorselessly overboard and marked us Not Wanted On the Voyage.

Which makes the whole conversation about pregnancy after loss a little awkward, and being pregnant, in the company of fellow Medusas, a little like being the elephant in the proverbial room.

I am twenty weeks pregnant today...a round, portentious number in a body becoming more round and portent by the day.  I am on bedrest, that strange half-life, existing and interacting mostly online.   I am disembodied, in a sense, and perversely grateful for the cloak of this purdah, this enforced hiding from the world.  Because in being pregnant, I already embody enough of my own nightmares that I'd just as soon not trigger anyone else's while they're innocently out for groceries. And yet here, in this good company, I know my words have just the same power to wound as my silhouette would if you ran across me in the checkout...that in owning the elephant, I risk sending someone's eyes darting away from the screen, hot with tears; I tread on scars and the plaintive sorrow of why not me?

I don't want to, but I do, just in being here.  I know that, and I am sorry.

I know I am profoundly lucky that pregnancy after has come easily, or at least conception has.  I had my second son, then a nine-week miscarriage, then a positive pregnancy test that's brought us safe thus far to this midwayish point, all tenterhooks and cervical stitch and quivering, half-naked hope I can still barely look in the eye.  But it is in the hope where the luck resides: hope spins futures, however cobwebby.  And it is futures, dreamed and cast to ruin, that haunt those who mourn.

In the early weeks after Finn died, when I was still waking shocked to find my body empty and no longer pregnant, I wanted desperately to turn back the clock.  I felt wrong, robbed.  I wanted to be pregnant, to rectify this hole that had somehow ripped its way through the space-time continuum.  As acceptance began to beat its way into me, and I flailed like a fish on a line trying not to confront the weight of my grief head-on, I wanted again to be pregnant...to force the hand of fate and try to peek, somehow, into a future I could no longer imagine.  But these were not the clinchers, not the reasons that led me to throw caution and the pill back to the wind.  It was more a compulsion than a decision, ultimately...an inarticulate, animal pull, like a cat in heat.  I felt reckless.  I wanted to breed, to be fecund, to ripen, to throw myself at pregnancy with all the fierceness I could muster.  I wanted to make babies, hundreds of babies.  I wanted it like I have wanted nothing else in my life, like it was the brass ring, the hope that would bring back hope.

And yet when I locked myself in my bathroom to take that home pregnancy test, five months after the death of my baby, I didn't feel hope.  I felt ridiculous, exposed, foolish.  I imagined cackling harpies crowding at the door, taunting me: look at the crazy lady whose baby died, conjuring up pregnancy symptoms!  pitiful!  nutjob!  bwaa haa haa haa!  Even when the test turned positive, they didn't have the decency to disappear, those harpies...they just altered their tune a bit, drowning out any hope I summoned, reminding me that I had no reason to expect that all would go well.

I did not trust my body.  I did not trust my instincts.  I once again had something precious to lose, to fear losing, and oh, how I feared with all my heart.  I became fixated on dates, on counting, on parsing out days until the heartbeat, the ultrasound, the window for x to go wrong, the next ultrasound, viability, the gestational age at which Finn died.  

I still do it.  For a brief window last fall, I had the most uncomplicated few weeks of pregnancy I've ever known.  Even with Finn, I'd begun bleeding a few days after I found out I was pregnant, and had thought for a week or more that I was miscarrying.  With my second son, I bled from the day of the positive test, harpies bleating, and died a little each time I peed for the entire seven months after.  So when my pregnancy last fall hit the six, seven, eight weeks with no sign of blood, I began to strut a little, inside, began to race ahead of myself with hopes and fantasies...began to think, this is what it feels like to be normal.  I felt the strange conviction that all would go well.  Ah, hubris.  The nine-week ultrasound showed that the fetus had never made it past six weeks.

So this time too, again, I leapt in still bruised, still with healing yet to do.   I leapt in acutely aware that what I want and what I think mean squat, in terms of outcomes of this pregnancy, understanding that if we were lucky enough to get out of the first trimester there would be bedrest, possible medical complications, all these things that scare the living shit out of me.  I still forgot that for days before every ultrasound I would manage to convince myself, subconsciously, that the baby had died...and thus leave with good news but feeling worse, as if the inevitable torture had merely been postponed.  I still forgot that the societal discourse surrounding pregnancy - all bloom and celebration and oooh, fight stretch marks! and let's have a shower at twenty weeks! and if something were wrong, mama would know - would make me feel like drinking rat poison...or like feeding it to the oblivious smiling hordes, so certain in their entitlement, their claim to a "rewarding" pregnancy.  I still forgot that I would choke on the words, "I'm pregnant," just as if I were an adolescent or a frightened eighteen year old...that I would feel sheer terror at the prospect of having to expose that much of my secret soul - my fragile hope - to people even long after my body was negating the need for an announcement. 

What I did not forget is that it is a gift, this one more try.

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What is your relationship to pregnancy after?   Is it a possibility?  Something longed for?  Feared?  If you've had multiple losses, did you find your relationship to the subsequent pregnancies different?  Did you choose an alternative path to having further children? 

If you have been pregnant after loss, what was the experience like for you?

And lastly...is this a topic you're comfortable encountering here, and if so, under what circumstances and terms?

the crack in everything

ring the bells that still can ring
forget your perfect offering
there is a crack, a crack in everything
that's how the light gets in

- Leonard Cohen

I heard the lines above last night, a melodic crescendo, and was stunned into reverie. Down to the sour smell of smoke and sawdust that were in the air that night, I was, for a moment, transported viscerally to the time and place they'd last crossed my consciousness.  Three summers ago, almost.  With old friends, gathered from our scattered points around the globe, for a weekend of talk and wine and beer.  It was nine weeks after he died.  I was supposed to be thirty-five weeks pregnant for that visit: instead, I was raw, raging, humbled...unmoored.  but with those friends I felt comparatively safe and we talked about him, a little, and they talked about him, a little, and there was no sweeping under the carpet and I felt freed by that, grateful...even welcomed the strangely soothing balm of the eight month old boy one couple had in tow.  The group of them were some touchstone of normal - of the me I had been before - in a time when there was none, elsewhere in my life. 

But then Leonard's voice broke in through light chatter and mild drunkenness on the second night of our gathering. ring the bells that still can ring, he intoned, gravelly and sage.  and suddenly I was choking on smoke and tears, and I bolted from my chair and went stumbling across the yard in the darkness, almost blind.  What fucking bells?   Seriously, what bells were left?  I was broken.

I'd lost my job along with my child.  I was struggling to find a place in a community we'd moved to only months before, struggling to find other work, struggling to get up the courage to leave the sanctuary of the house on a daily basis.   I was a parentless child and a jobless professional...and we'd left our old life behind on another continent to come home and have a baby.  Without that baby, I could not figure out how to go forward.

I'd been, I think, in the denial stage of my grief.  I looked back to my friends in the circle of light on the deck, and realized, there really is no going back to normal.  fuck me gently.  And then I went inside and mixed myself a Southern Comfort Janis Joplin would've been proud of, and sat, numb, staring, bewildered.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The thing about grief - and in particular, the keening loss that was deadbaby grief for me - that blew my mind was how it robbed me of any clue about how to continue to live my life in a meaningful way.  I understood, factually, that I still had a reasonable semblance of a life, if one in a bit of a shambles at the time - but I could not connect to it.  I groped for the bells left to me to ring and came up clutching air.  It wasn't the overabundance of a sheltered life in my previous incarnation, either, that left me so bereft even of my self, of my survival instinct, my resilience: I'd been violated before, just by living...betrayed, divorced, disappointed, grieved.   But I'd never been stopped up short.

I wonder, sometimes, what it must have been like to grieve a child back in the days of our great-grandmothers, when infant death and pregnancy loss were common and maternal death a fairly regular outcome of childbearing.  I imagine it was still a lonely, isolated thing for many, particularly given the stiff upper lip with which loss would've been expected to be met in many communities and circumstances.   And yet...other than the fact that fewer of us would be present in this company of mourners, lost as we would have been along with our babies...there would have been one key difference between then and now: we would not, could not, have gone into pregnancy without realizing that a loss of this scale was very possible.

I realize, finally, three years on, that that has been the crack in everything, for me.

That pregnancy was fraught with bleeding from the early days.  At six weeks, I was told I was probably miscarrying, and sent home on bedrest.  It felt surreal, but not shocking.  I knew women miscarried.  I knew a number of women who had miscarried.  My partner had already lost two, with his first wife, so I understood full well that the risk of that loss was part of the bargain I'd gotten myself into.  But when the bleeding resolved and the docs said all clear and I sailed past fourteen weeks with no further complications and a perfectly normal ultrasound, I was naive enough to believe that I was pretty much going to be bringing a baby home.  I wasn't sure that baby might not have some minor health issues or delays...I worked in special ed, I knew not every child fits every norm, but to even consider seriously that my baby might die seemed beyond dramatic, frivolous, macabre. 

Such are the miracle assumptions modern science has taught us to espouse.  All other truths and possibilities - especially those that involve dead babies, unsavable, for no apparent reason - are silenced in the mainstream discourse surrounding pregnancy and birth, these days.  There is no norm left to us, and so we are unwelcome and awkward and exposed in the societal conversation surrounding how babies are made, marginalized because we can be, because medicine has made us anachronisms, relics.  

In retrospect, I see now that I've dealt with every other sorrow that's come my way in life by telling myself I expected it.  Each time, it was at least somewhat true.  Nature and experience shaped me as a cynic of sorts, a Cassandra, attuned to the emotional and relational roadbumps that littered most of the paths I ever chose.  I got wounded along the way, but seldomly truly surprised.  And that helped.  It didn't assuage the pain, not necessarily in the moment, but it left me semi-intact, with bells held in reserve still to be rung.  Until I was blindsided by the death of a child who had at least a 75% chance of survival even at the moment of his untimely birth, I had never had all the bells torn from me at once...even the small, cold, brass one marked i saw it all coming.   Without it, and without the baby in whose basket I'd piled all my hopes, I was - for the first time - bereft.
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Last night, listening to Cohen and time-travelling, I wondered about what seems to me now like the naive and sheltered discourse that surrounds pregnancy in our day and age and culture.  And I sang along, frog-voiced but loud, proud, forget your perfect offering.  there is a crack, a crack in everything.

We embody the crack in the perfect offering of modern pregnancy sold to us by Parenting Magazine and BabyCenter and What to Expect When You're Expecting.  We embody it because our children are not here to.

The logical conclusion, of course, to my stretched analogy is, then, that we are how the light gets in.  A part of me likes that.

eight short words

Three years ago.

It was three years ago today I left the hospital for the first time after nearly three weeks of bedrest.  I'd been airlifted in during winter's last April gasp, but in my hermetic isolation in ye olde Craftmatic, the ground had transformed into a mushy carpet, spongy with sprigs of green poking through it.  I felt like Rip Van Winkle, utterly out of time.

We drove out of the city, to the old tower on its outskirts, the one I'd climbed as a child every time we visited.  My legs were weak and I walked gingerly.  I was not in pain, per se...just timid, afraid I would break.  The tower was closed, too old, too dangerous to be left open for tourists any longer.  I stood in front of it, staring, as if I looked long and hard enough I might catch a glimpse of a younger me, might disappear with her into a different time, any other time than this.

She did not materialize, that former self.  And I realized, viscerally, that she never would again...that there was no going back.  I had stepped off the side of my own flat earth.

I turned in the rain, then, and tested my footing on the slippery bank of overgrowth there that leads up and then down, eventually, to the harbour.  I climbed a little, until I was alone on a low ridge, looking down through the brush on tiny sailboats, seabirds.  And when I was sure I was far enough away that no one could hear me, I spoke into the wind, and spoke his name for the first time in the thirty-six hours since he'd died.

i had a son.  his name was Finn.

It was only a whisper, spoken to raindrops.  But I knew it might be a very long time before I had the courage to say those words aloud again, to risk exposing the gaping wound I had suddenly become, to risk being that crazy lady talking about her dead baby.  I knew too that I needed, desperately, to mark him on the world, to tell someone of my joy and my pride in him, of my sorrow, to tell that he had been here. 

My tears mixed with the rain and those eight words echoed.
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It was only in the year and more after his death that those echoes found expression anywhere, for me.  On my blog, I began to carve out a space in which I could say his name, lay out sides of my parenting experience that I had no way to speak in polite company.  I felt exposed, but freed, too.  And in finding ways to incorporate Finn's story into my own narratives of myself as parent, I slowly became, once more, a version of whole.

Of the six of us here, I am the furthest out on this road of grieving and healing, the one whose loss is the furthest removed in time.  I am the one whose firstborn died, who went home both a mother and not a mother.  I was utterly changed by the eleven hours of my son's life, but the disconnect between the internal sea change of becoming a parent and the external lack of anything to show for it...that sparked its own particular grief and isolation.  I am the only one, yet, who has had another child born since my loss, and perhaps the only one who has had another loss in the interim.  I am proof of survival. And I am grateful to be in the company of these woman here, sister Medusas and friends, all of us with our stories.  

My name is Bonnie.  I had a son.  His name was Finn. 

Welcome.

where have you been, my blue-eyed son?

oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
oh, where have you been, my darlin' young one?

- A hard rain's a-gonna fall
Bob Dylan

I used to daydream, in the dark early days, that i could see him in the faces of little boys i saw in stores, or playing in the park.  I'd never paid much attention to little boys, before...but suddenly the veil of my disinterest lifted and they seemed to be legion, be everywhere, all knees and ears and motion swirling on the periphery of my world.  Other people's boys.  They brought me up short, made me catch my breath with wonder and longing.  Would he have tilted his head like that, held his arms just so?  Would the dark fuzz of his baby hair have grown into cowlicks, like that one's?  Would he have had a husky laugh?  Would he have come running into my arms pell-mell like the little fellow who nearly knocked me off my feet one day at the mall, racing towards his mother, squealing?  Would he have liked my stories, my tune-challenged guitar-playing?  Would he have had a crooked smile?

Every boy I saw, I wondered, and I ached.  Too late, I had discovered the beauty of boyhood for the first time, and I could not tear my eyes away.

That was a long time ago.  It's rare now.  Occasionally, if I meet a boy of a certain age, or if I catch my younger son and his cousins with their heads bent over a sandbox or a train table, three boys together, the shadow of a dark-haired fourth looms before me, almost waving.  It's bittersweet, now, this presence in absence...it is the closest I get to the sense of him being with me.  But that shadow is still - and forever - painfully indistinct, compared to those could-have-beens, those other boys.  They are technicolour...and he?  He is only ashes. 

What I believe, I suppose, is that we will all be ash and dust someday.  That he has gone ahead, though quite possibly into nothing.  I do not believe in angels.  Am ambivalent about souls, hopeful but ultimately unsure.  Thus his potential nothingness, his erasure, is the hardest aspect of grief for me to reconcile.  He was my child.  I believe that he mattered, that he was someone, a boy all his own, even if the world never got to unwrap what he carried latent in that small self, that tiny body broken by birth.  I believe this, but I do not know how to believe the rest...the what he is now, the where he might be.  My unbelief wounds me.  I fear that I long for something that is utterly gone.  And I fear that he is not utterly gone but out there alone, somehow, needing his mother.  I fear that I am failing to mother him, and I fear that I am trying to mother something that is only a memory, not even a spectre.

And yet I knew him, though I will never lay eyes on the boy he might have become.  I knew him, knew the kick of his feet inside, the wild, soaring leap of him when I placed headphones on my belly.  I knew, when he was born, the shape of his brow as my own, his small feet as the twins of his father's.  And I knew from the fierce grip of his tiny hand on my finger, reflex though it well may have been, that he knew me, smelled me, sensed my presence.  If he is only shadow now, he was not, not then. 

All those other boys out there who wove in and out of my peripheral vision for so long, taunting me with what might have been, what I had lost...they have faded with time, become the shadows, blurred.  They were never mine, only other people's boys.  Whereas that little body that housed my son and the boy he might have been, ashes though it is, is burned on me brighter and deeper than all their myriad of laughing faces.

Wherever he may be, I hope he knows.