Us mortals, we like to fathom. Make sense. Calculate. Depend on. Plan. We accept that being derailed is part of the journey, and getting back on track reinforces the predictability, the reliability of life. But when life just becomes one derailment after another, do you create a different path?
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Over the past two months, as I have sat with the thought of my little girl turning five years old, I realized that she is just that—my little girl. She is not symbolic, not abstract, not a purpose or a motivation. She was not a perfect piece of our life’s puzzle, which fit perfectly to make us whole. She was a little girl, a beautiful infant, who did not get to write her own magical story.
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Despite all my pleas and prayers, death invades my imagination so sharply that it becomes more potent than my reality. At any time of day, while I am driving, cooking, reading, working, just merely trying to put one foot in front of the other, death dangles the other shoe in front of me, daring me to avoid dropping it too.
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I look at the documents open on my computer. I need to write a story. About what I can do. How and where I fit. How much I want this. I picture myself, a broken me, as a piece in the giant machinery of an organization. Maybe my cracks will not show from a distance. Once I’m part of the bigger puzzle, maybe I will fit in and play my role in completing the picture. But for now, I need to tell my story the way it is. No, nothing positive really came from the loss. But it sucked the wind from under my wings. I am trying to get a little bit of it back. I hope I do it with you.
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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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In my conscious attempt to steer clear of catastrophe, I had been focusing too much on the “how,” when it all comes down to “what” and the absence of “why.” That it is always a life too short, a death too soon, and the meaninglessness in between. So I visited Ground Zero last fall and this summer. For the first time in the four years of living barely an hour from it. I stood there in silence, daring to open up to the lives I knew were ripped apart that day. I allowed myself to believe that I knew every single parent, sibling, spouse and child who forever lost a part of their heart that day. I need not imagine. I knew.
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.
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: not ttc | infertility after loss
: parenting after loss
: on the bookshelf
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: how to help a friend through babyloss
: how to plan a baby's funeral
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