Ghost.

My senior year of high school,  a friend of mine was killed in a car wreck, along with his girlfriend Melissa, and his best friend's girlfriend.  (The best friend survived with serious injuries, but that is neither here nor there.)

Some months after the wreck--which happened in September--I came out of Journalism class and saw a ghost.  Melissa, coming out of the Art classroom across the hall.

Naturally, I knew it *wasn't* Melissa.  It was her little sister, whose name I don't recall.  They looked almost exactly alike, and I remembered thinking how difficult it must be for everyone involved to have a surviving child who looked just like the tragically lost one.  (Not in the least for the girl herself, who was probably upset by reactions like mine, which were undoubtedly frequent at that school.)

Now I find myself in a similar position.

I joke all the time that all my kids look alike.  This is because they really do; they all look like me.  (And all of my dad's family look alike.)

Before Psalm, Marie was my only dark-haired baby.  Which is weird given I have dark hair, but it's just the way the genes worked out.  You can kind of tell in that picture who is who, because Psalm's color just was never good, but they still look incredibly alike.

Another thing is that all my kids are pretty hairy, but again since most of them are light-haired, it's nearly impossible to tell.  Marie and Psalm are the only ones with dark enough hair for their back fuzz to be visible.

They really both had a lot of hair even at birth.  I think Psalm had even more than Marie; it was long enough it was starting to curl.

Of course, there is a slightly different dynamic in play when the surviving sibling is the older one.  I have no way of knowing, for instance, whether Psalm would have had brown eyes like Marie, or blue ones like her father, brother, & sisters.  And of course we could never know her personality, though the way she survived so long in utero makes me think she would have been another firecracker had she not had LBWC.

But still.  I have this little girl who lives in my mind, and my mind makes her look like Marie did, because who else would she look like?  So with Marie, she is a reminder sometimes that there should be a second dark-haired girl in my family.  Someone else for her to fight and play with.

And that makes me sad.

Everyday

A while back, one of my Facebook friends said, on a status about having to call the insurance company to tell them Psalm had died, that it's the everyday things that get you the most.  He was right, of course, in more than just dealing with the insurance company.

I didn't commemorate a week of her death, or a month.  Her due date was commemorated with her memorial service.  I don't foresee myself especially marking three months, or six, but perhaps I will.  Right now, grief is at the same high level every day, and there's no reason for me to stop and say "Oh, it's been this long", because it all feels like one long day.

Still, it's the everyday things that get you.  The van is parked, broken down, and to go anywhere we walk half a mile to the bus stop and as we go I feel Psalm's lack; she should be tied to my chest in the mei tai, carried along up next to my heart.

Halloween is a favorite holiday of ours (as so many other people), and when I first found out I was due in late October I started thinking of a teeny tiny Halloween costume and it fucking sucks to be walking through Wal-Mart and see all the tiny little Halloween-themed onesies and pajamas and have no baby to buy them for.

And there are babies everywhere; October is high time for them because January is so cold.  Some time ago, at Wal-Mart to buy some things we needed, I saw a tiny little brown-haired baby girl who couldn't have been more than a week or two old, as Psalm would have been, and I had to go outside and cry where her parents couldn't see me.  San Antonio is a bad town to have brown-haired baby girls make you cry, but I have since discovered that seeing any newborn hurts like hell.  Clearly, I should just stop going out, but of course that is not practical.

I can feel her with me.  Not a ghost, unless ghosts are a manifestation of the survivors' sadness, but she was my sixth child and after five children you know how a baby feels in your arms.  And my arms are empty, but I can feel where she should be; I can feel her small weight as though she were there, and perfect.  I think often of how much she looked like her daddy, and how dark and wavy her hair was and how like Marie she would be.  Strong, stubborn little girl.

Grief is a strange thing.

So many things...

It occurs to me that I haven't posted very many photos of Psalm here, so I am to rectify that today...

I would take your pain away and hurt for you if I could, but I fear that doing so would mean taking away some of the love you feel as well, because those are the two sides of the same coin.  Still, I hate like hell that there is anyone else out there who knows exactly how I feel.

There's been another baby born to the support group, a wee tiny boy who lived a quarter of an hour.  And oh, my God, the pain.  The remembered pain.  I ache for his mother because now the pain isn't an abstract thing, it's an exact thing.  I know how it feels to wake up with empty arms and empty womb and oh, my friends, I cannot explain it to you and I hope like hell all you can do is imagine it yourselves.

God's cruelty is refining. (Stephen King, Desperation)

There are dark thoughts that will not leave my mind.  No thoughts of harm or wishing I wasn't here.  Nothing that serious.  Worries about my girl.  When she opened her mouth at me and grimaced at first I thought she was in pain, but I rationalized it as her trying to cry.  But what if I'm wrong?  What if those were frantic gasps for breath, with underdeveloped lungs too small to pull in air?

Just the same, she opened her eyes and looked at me and I saw there the wise look that all newborns have.  But someone else interpreted her look as fright.  What if she was right?  What if Psalm was frightened by the lights, by the noise, by her own failing body?

How much of what we tell ourselves about death is true, and how much of it is lies to make ourselves feel better?  We presume there is little to no pain, that it is somehow a serene slipping away, but there's no way to know that's true.  And that troubles me, because I made the best decision I could for her but there's always the chance that my choices were the wrong ones.

We mamas of lost babies have been called strong.  After a while, this becomes a burden.  We're not strong.  We're just doing what we have to, just putting one foot in front of the other and moving forward because while your heart is beating and you are breathing, there is no other choice.

I have no strength left in me.  None.  I have given all I have to other people, and I swear to God if I hear one more line about men being stoic and holding up things for their families I am going to scream.

We had Psalm's memorial service this past Tuesday, on my due date.  Dry-eyed, I arranged to have a photo blown up to display at the service, and I packed her green blanket and the little baby book from Sufficient Grace ministries to act as a guest book and I took them and I laid them out on the table.  I thought the service would be the time to cry; I told the girls this was the time we are given to be sad.  But I'm the one who had to stand up and be strong for those who were crying.  I'm the one who has shed her tears hiding in the bathroom more often than not so I don't bring others down.  I'm the one who went outside after seeing her death certificate and her ashes so I would bother no one with my grief.  I'm the one who kept quiet about how fucking much it hurt to have a friend's child born on my due date because I didn't want to upset my husband with the knowledge it was happening or the friend with the knowledge of how painful it was.  I hurt physically and emotionally and I am sucking up both sources of pain because that's just what the fuck I do.

Just fucking once, I wish someone would speak of my daughter as though she was a normal baby.  As though her presence was the presence of a real person, not the embodiment of...something.

I posted to Facebook the video the midwife gave us of her moving around and making faces and kicking me in the face.  When it happened, it was a happy moment because here I am cut open on a table and my newborn is kicking me in the face.  Yep, she's my kid for sure.  Grouchy as fuck and kicking.  There was nothing beautiful or precious or anything about that.  It was the closest thing to a moment of normalcy we got that day.  But I guess it's not realistic to ask other people to look past the circumstances and see the moment for the moment.  I realize Psalm isn't really real to most people, and that most folks have a problem with seeing any newborn as a 100% human human, but I just want some tiny little slice of normal to cling to because otherwise this is just an ongoing nightmare.

All that girl wants to be is loved....

What we have done is not because of being strong.

It is not because of pro-life beliefs.

It is not because of faith.

All of those things are there, perhaps.  But the reason we continued this pregnancy without a second thought, even though we knew the heartbreak that awaited us at the end of the road, is simple:

Love.

That is the reason.  I loved this child from the moment I suspected I was carrying her.  I will love her until the day I die, and (God willing) in the life beyond this one.

This has long been my favorite Bible verse, 1 Corinthians 13:1:

If I speak with the tongues of men or of angels, but have not love, I am but a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.

The ending verse of the chapter (the one that contains the "Love is patient, love is kind..." bit that is read at so many weddings) is more famous, and equally applicable here:

Three things remain: faith, hope, and love.  And the greatest of these is love.

It is all about love.  Jesus said "This is my commandment.  Love one another as I have loved you."  (John 15:12, remarkably nearly the same in every translation.)  I'm nowhere near Jesus levels of love, but I love as much as I can.

My uncle, who was like a father to me, was Wiccan; they believe in a Spiral of Rebirth, rather similar to the Hindu belief in reincarnation, where you are reborn as many times as you need to learn the lessons you need.  And I was thinking about this, and the question arose "What could a person need to learn that a 90-minute life is long enough?"  And the answer is obvious.  She needed to be loved.  And so she was.