I wanted to write a post about how I feel better. About how now that I have birthed a breathing, screaming rainbow baby boy, things feel different. About how when I look back on this pregnancy, I can see that I was an anxious, crazy, hormonal, emotional, grieving mess. That I was not myself. That I am so relieved to no longer be living in a place of such deep anxiety.
I wanted to write about how I am myself again, but that it is a new self than one year ago, before my daughter died. About how I feel okay with that. Glad, even.
But I've come to know many other mothers who have also had babies die, and I still read their stories. And here's the thing -- I feel better, there has been healing . . . but there is a missing part. An aching hole in my heart, and in the universe. It's a hole of absence -- and not just of my daughter, but of all the daughters and all the sons that just barely were and now aren't in this world. A hole of gasping grief for those babies that are gone.
I am feeling that emptiness today. I am not even necessarily expressly sad, but there is a yearning within me, a sort of communal keening of my heart in tune with all the other hearts that have lost.
If I didn't believe in God before, death would make me believe. Because there is nothing more unnatural, nothing more sacredly wrong feeling, than death.
That is what I am feeling today, I think -- the vacuum of the sweet and beautiful souls taken by the ugliness of death. Just as I was writing this post, I learned of yet one more woman who has recently experienced the trauma of babyloss, the hurt that just shouldn't be.
We are living in a beautiful world broken by ugliness and death. I have become much more sensitive to, much more aware of that brokenness since becoming a bereaved mother. How could I never before see how much pain people and animals are carrying? And while I do have hope, a very real and living hope in a vibrant, dynamic, and loving God . . . the void created by that pain, and especially by my daughter's death, still yawns wide within me.
This will never feel okay.
I wanted to write about how I am myself again, but that it is a new self than one year ago, before my daughter died. About how I feel okay with that. Glad, even.
But I've come to know many other mothers who have also had babies die, and I still read their stories. And here's the thing -- I feel better, there has been healing . . . but there is a missing part. An aching hole in my heart, and in the universe. It's a hole of absence -- and not just of my daughter, but of all the daughters and all the sons that just barely were and now aren't in this world. A hole of gasping grief for those babies that are gone.
I am feeling that emptiness today. I am not even necessarily expressly sad, but there is a yearning within me, a sort of communal keening of my heart in tune with all the other hearts that have lost.
If I didn't believe in God before, death would make me believe. Because there is nothing more unnatural, nothing more sacredly wrong feeling, than death.
That is what I am feeling today, I think -- the vacuum of the sweet and beautiful souls taken by the ugliness of death. Just as I was writing this post, I learned of yet one more woman who has recently experienced the trauma of babyloss, the hurt that just shouldn't be.
We are living in a beautiful world broken by ugliness and death. I have become much more sensitive to, much more aware of that brokenness since becoming a bereaved mother. How could I never before see how much pain people and animals are carrying? And while I do have hope, a very real and living hope in a vibrant, dynamic, and loving God . . . the void created by that pain, and especially by my daughter's death, still yawns wide within me.
This will never feel okay.