This too is true

4:24 am

After nursing Noah at 3-ish, I can’t get back to sleep. I watched him breathe in my arms, this 17 lb 6 month old body of his cradled against mine, my arms full at last of baby. And I set him gently down in the hotel playpen and I tucked his lovey around him.

And now I’m awake feeling the emptiness where Emily should be and making the stuffy nose I got from him worse. It doesn’t get any better, really; I think the wave-swells of grief remain just as tidal and it’s only that I’ve learned to lift my feet and float rather than try to plant myself against them. I am so bereft still and I miss the infant she was and the two year she would be today. I miss the girlness of her and I miss her dark brown baby hair and I miss her chin that was so like Noah’s. Even as one of the strongest memories I have of it was it quivering while she had seizure, the rest of her immobile. Just that chin.

And I’m angry at the hospital that took her away from us with its – their, because they were people – uncaring and inattention and sins of omission. I’m angry that Carl’s been hurt enough that part of him seems to have vanished since then. I’m sure the same is true for me. I’m angry at stupid little things too: there was a problem with her headstone and we were moving and they didn’t have our number and I was pregnant and the result is that we only got it all settled in January and so it’s not there yet and that feels – wrong. In another 7 weeks it will be there. But not yet. And I’m just – angry.

But mostly I’m bereft, again. Today’s the 15th: the longest day I ever had in my life, the day of test results and advice and a baptism and then, in 24 hrs from just about this moment now, a last breath. I still hear that laboured breathing and I still feel just as helpless about it now. That gap never closes.

I miss you so my baby girl. I wish so hard that you were on this journey with us still. I feel so much like I let you down; I’ll never be such a silent patient again but you really paid the price for that life lesson. I wish you too had found out what it’s like to get milk-drunk at the breast; to be rocked to sleep; to look at all the red exit signs on the walk from the dining room to the hotel room here.

Although we never would have come here if it weren’t for losing you. I wonder who we all would have been, you, your dad, and I. I wonder who you were besides Emily; the comet through the night sky. I have an idea now what your birth should have been like, and what it would have been like to bring you home and hold you through the night and get up with you when you woke up in beds both familiar and strange. But I don’t have any real idea who you were; your brother’s so clearly himself that I only know you would have been yourself. Uniquely you. And god, I miss you.