a love song from the early days
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this cursed body of mine, a walking grave,
a shallow coffin,
now scarred by an indescribable kind
of maternal violence
that i shudder to absorb
Amado, aged 3, playing in the park with a dog
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Though I know that what is mothered can never really be lost.
My heartbeat is mundane,
and the same as before my baby died
And so much of motherhood is mundane delights,
Laughter and wet grass beneath our feet,
So close I can almost feel it
Swag bags and grief
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This was a much sadder swag bag. In it were pamphlets for bereaved parents, funeral home brochures, and a teddy bear weighted with marbles to give us something to clutch in the absence of our daughter. This time I walked out the door, bag in hand, chest sunken, head bowed, my body utterly broken.
But maybe, just maybe, still a warrior.
Read MoreTen
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Yes! Yes, I think. We need different words – a new language – to say what or who you were. You never breathed air. You were never that kind of baby. When I’ve pictured you, you’ve never been a baby, in fact; you are always a girl, but because I never got to know what girl you’d become, the shape of you just slips away, again and again.
Read MoreWhere I am right now
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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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