On the evening of my 33rd birthday, when Cecilia was 4 weeks old, I attended my first grief support meeting with the Compassionate Friends. I have since attended these monthly meetings with other broken and bereft parents looking for answers. At the meeting last night, I sat there thinking how most of us were never…
In December of 2018, I separated from my husband and Lizzy and I moved in with my older sister. As a welcome-home gift, she gave me a white pot with the word “Hope” in black letting across the front. She said she thought it was an appropriate sentiment for what I was going through. I…
For the past five months, I have been having this recurring dream, or, rather, I’ve been dreaming a scene in a dream that is recurring, although I arrive there from different dreams on different nights. It is twilight, somewhere between sunset and dusk, and there is a glassy body of water in front of me,…
I keep waiting (despite my better judgment) for it to get easier, but nighttime is still by far the worst. I spin in circles with eyes wide open, laying there and waiting, waiting for my life to get worse, for the new unthinkable to happen: for Cecilia to die. They say the chances of SIDS…
What use is there in playing out alternate versions of reality? Anyone who has ever encountered the concept of the butterfly effect knows that this game ends in madness. There are too many minute details, to many infinite consequences of the tiniest shift in choice. There is ultimately no point. But this does not stop…
I was alone like a tunnel. The birds fled from me,and night swamped me with its crushing invasion.To survive myself I forged you like a weapon,like an arrow in my bow, a stone in my sling. But the hour of vengeance falls, and I love you. – Pablo Neruda, “Body of a Woman” Above is…
The thing about grief is that you don’t only have to deal with your own grief; you have to deal with everyone else’s grief too. Sometimes this is a gift, when their tears or breakdowns reassure you how much your child was loved and wanted. But sometimes it is a burden, when their grief causes…
In the grief world, there is something called “secondary losses,” which basically refers to the relationships that you used to have that end up disintegrating because of your grief. I have not written for some time because I have been going through a particularly painful secondary loss. I confess I don’t really know what to…
I have long held a theory that love is about presence–and not just any type of presence, specifically physical presence. We live in a society that allows us to substitute physical presence with many types of shortcuts, technological alternatives, or gimmicks, but the reality remains that nothing can substitute true, physical presence. Physical presence is…