Only Love

I miss looking forward to all that was ahead.
The last line of my last post.
Like any baby, Tikva was all promise, all hope.
Everything was ahead, and anything could unfold.
Anything.

That is one of the losses I feel right now - the loss of promise.
The loss of being able to exist completely in the moment with Tikva,
Not knowing how long the moment would last,
But knowing that it could continue.

This morning Tikva was in my dream.
She wasn't alive, but her soft little body was there.
In the care of Allyson, who was doing some testing.
She had no wires attached to her.
A few times in the dream Tikva opened her eyes and looked around from side to side,
Allyson explained that they sometimes do that after they've died.

I looked at her cute little face with eyes open.
I spoke to her, told her I missed her.
Then I told Allyson that I knew she wasn't alive anymore,
But it still felt good to talk to her while her eyes were open.
I woke up feeling like she was right there.
She probably was.

I went to bed so sad last night.
Scared, too.
Every once in a while, I had been reading a blog post by other moms who have lost babies.
Not too many, but still finding them once in a while; visiting another mother's loss and grief.
I can't do that anymore, at least not right now.
I feel too deeply for them, my heart just breaks.
I crave a community that understands my experience from a similar experience.
Yet each of us is so different - our babies were different, our experiences are different, the way we experience loss is different.
I think in the end, while we can hold each other gently, compassionately, we are each alone in the part of our personal experience that only we feel.

Stillbirth has been on my mind lately.
All of a sudden I am so aware of yet another way in which women lose their babies.
I know a handful of women whose babies have died late in their pregnancies or during labor.
They share their beautiful stories in such raw honesty.
Yet it is not my experience, and I worry that carrying its energy will just make me more afraid.
More afraid when it is time to get pregnant again.
More afraid at how precarious it all is.
So I pay attention to releasing its energy, if that's possible.
Or separating myself from it, if that's possible.
Caring deeply without absorbing.

Fear is not a fluid energy - it feels stuck and it doesn't move easily within me.
Grief, sadness - these energies are more fluid, they move.
I have always been a "you have to go through it to get through it" person.
This is how I have always encountered the huge challenges in my life.
I go through all of the dark and complex emotions and I come through it in the end.
Often tired and sometimes weary, but clear and more free.

I wonder, though, if Dave has figured out a better way.
Maybe you don't have to go through such dark heavy sticky muck on the road to healing.
Maybe it's possible and completely okay to feel good through this grief?
Who am I to say I have it all figured out?
I really don't.
And this journey is so different emotionally than the others I have been on.

My period came on Thursday, for the first time in a year.
It's a good thing, I know, because it means my hormones are balancing back to normal and that needs to happen if I want to get pregnant again in the future.
A different kind of loss, though - I wasn't supposed to be bleeding right now.
I was supposed to be nursing my daughter.

Seeing very young babies and pregnant women is still hard.
That is part of the same grief.
I wonder if they truly appreciate their blessings.
I ask myself that every day when I am with Dahlia: Am I appreciating this incredible child enough?
Sometimes I do a better job than others.

I went to the cemetery on Wednesday for the first time since Tikva's burial.
I didn't plan it, it was spontaneous.
Driving there I realized it was September 10, and Tikva would have been 3 months old.
Just three months since her birth, and already she's been gone for 5 weeks.

Thankfully it was sunny, which makes Colma kind of a pretty place.
When it's foggy and gray and cold it makes me sad.
But on a sunny day, I notice the hills and the butterflies and the birds and the tiny flowers growing in the grass.
I look around at the gravestones and whisper their Jewish names to hear their sounds on my tongue.
Wondering who they were and how they lived, who they loved and were loved by.


I brought golden daisies in a pot to Tikva.
And to my grandmother Ala at the cemetery down the street.
Tiny yellow flowers had started growing in the grass above Tikva.
Tiny daisies grew in the grass above Ala.

Ala died 23 years ago when she was 72.
She died of pancreatic cancer, and she died younger than she would have without it.
But she died when she was older after living 72 years.
The distance from the time when she died and the fact that she'd died as a grandma makes it easier to visit her grave without tears.
I cried a lot as I sat with Tikva.

I know her spirit isn't there in that cemetery.
But being there where her body was buried made it easy for me to talk to her.
Like in my dream from this morning, I told her how much I miss her.
I told her how much I wish she had lived,
How much I wish she were still with me in my arms,
Rather than floating around me in the breeze.

Then I saw two butterflies playing
And a bird that kept pausing like a hummingbird.
And I knew she was there with me.
In the tiny yellow flowers that had sprouted in the grass, too.
And I just let myself cry for a long time.

I never imagined I would be at the cemetery where my Baby Girl was buried.
Next to babies whose gravestones had only one date, or who had lived a few weeks, a few months, a year.
Again the disbelief that I have a child who died as a baby.
Who was born so sick, with insurmountable hurdles.
Who was so mighty and courageous and beautiful.
Who lived for such a short time.

BUT WHO LIVED.

That is what I said to Dave last night: I am so glad that Tikva lived.
Even though it makes the pain of losing her so great.
She could have been born and not survived her birth.
But instead, SHE LIVED.

My friend Lauren reminds me: Tikva is real. She lived. And she died.
She certainly did live... Oh, how she lived.
And I got to hold her.
And I got to give her my milk.
And I got to touch her.
AND I GOT TO LOVE HER... from the minute she was conceived.
I got to hold her as only a mother can hold her Baby Girl.

In her lifetime, TIKVA KNEW ONLY LOVE.
BOY DID SHE KNOW LOVE.