Enough

I have no time to write. I have no time for, really, anything right now. With Christmas a week away, I am buried in a self-created pit of cookies, wrapping paper, and Elf shenanigan planning.

And, I say this without the slightest trace of my usual irony, lucky, lucky me.

Like the rest of our country, and some of the rest of the world, I am beyond devastated for the families in Connecticut who are forever changed by, well, you know. I can't bring myself to think of that boy's name--and yes, I mean boy despite his being 20, or however old he was. Those children, those teachers . . . just gone. For no reason other than someone else's personal . . . what? Suffering? Anger? Vendetta? No reason, really. Just because.

And it feels like we, as a collective country/society/world, can do nothing but blame blame blame. It feels necessary to look for an answer, a WHY to follow the WHAT and the HOW. But guess what? There is no WHY. Only a big, fat IS, WAS, DID.

Maybe we should blame the guns. Yes, yes, it was the guns. No wait! It's the access to mental healthcare, the way we treat people with mental illness. No, it was actually his MOTHER'S fault! Yes, the mother, as per usual, right? Oh but wait, maybe it was the video games. Or maybe the movies. Or television. But probably it was the President's fault--no, that's not right. It was God's fault. Nope, got it wrong again, it's because God was "kicked out" of school (my personal favorite--there's that irony!).

It was all of this and none of this (OK, I'm almost positive it wasn't the god-kicked-out-of-school thing--that's shit thinking is just inexcusable). It was a young man who had a weapon and took the lives of 26 people and filled the broken hearts of our country with absolute fear. The end.

And arguing about it? Co-opting the sheer anguish of these grieving families? Disgusting. I get that we all grieve differently, and for some of us clicking on FB links and pictures and sharing vapid messages makes us feel empowered. But really? This is the best we can do?

I've had enough of the pablum that comes along with tragedy. "Light a candle for . . ." "Hug your children . . ." "Wear school colors . . ." Frankly, I've had enough of this type of tragedy to last a thousand lifetimes. Shit, I'm tired of the word "tragedy."

Among the phrases and words that make me want to scream, coincidentally, is tragedy, along with its qualifier "unthinkable." Really? Unthinkable? It wouldn't be nearly as terrifying if you couldn't imagine it, couldn't believe it could happen to your family, your child, your parent, your friend if you truly *couldn't* imagine it.

I'm a jerk, right? I am. I'm really, really sad. None of this bullshit we call "helping" does JACK for these mothers, fathers, siblings, grandparents, children, and friends in utter agony right now. My own solution? Forget all that noise, the memes and the FB pages and the pictures of sad candles and the j-man field trip. Send light, and love, directly from my own broken heart to theirs. Say the names of those children and teachers. Honor their memory by emblazoning their faces on my heart, making room for them there with all the others.

Turning off the television, tuning in to their pain and honoring it. Shutting out the distractions and sending them love. This is all that makes sense to me, it is all I would want.

It's all I did want.

Love to you all. xo

Catching Up

Holy crap, is it really November? And I haven't been here since August? Shoot.

I'm mad at Blogger for being an asshole. I keep trying to comment on posts and my comments get eaten, sent into oblivion. Anyone else? What the hell. So, I guess, if you're reading this and I usually comment on your posts, please know I've been reading, and trying to comment. But maybe what I have to say is deemed too stupid by Blogger, and it's saving face for me.

Life's been, you know, life. Busy. Bumbling. E's in school four days a week, so O and I have some more time, just the two of us. Sleep schedules are erratic, hence little sit-and-think time for me.

But I have been thinking. O turns two in two days. Gosh. Two years. I can't help but remember those last days of panic, worry, fear, anticipation and excitement before he was born. I hardly dared hope he would make it. But oh, he did.

And she didn't. And I wasn't worried about her at all. Now I worry about the two here, all the time.

I think about the rest of forever. Forever missing that little girl I never even knew. I think about those first days after she was born. The earthquake in Haiti. The cold, cold January air. Being wheeled out of a hospital empty handed.

(No, that's not right. I was wheeled out with my maternity clothes and a binder full of good ideas on how to grieve.)

My life is so very different from then, now. That was almost three years ago.

I am getting better at being around almost-three-year-old girls. The pounding in and on my chest has slowed to just a dull thump here and there.

It's the waiting, though, for the inevitable stumbling blocks. This is the thing, I'm learning, about forever. Shit's bound to happen sooner or later. Like, "You're not going for a girl?", "You have boys, they're so much easier than girls," or meeting a girl named Calla--which has happened, but she was the hostess at a restaurant, an older teenager, maybe early 20s. Meeting new people and deciding when, or if, I should explain about our dead baby, what their reaction and departure-time-out-the-door time will be.

The sadness just creeps up and surprises me sometimes. And it surprises me, really, to think that I've gone so many days and nights without crying, when almost three years ago I couldn't imagine the crying could ever stop.

It is a challenge to parent my children sometimes. E is . . . intense. The kind of kid who wakes up before 6, worrying if he'll have to have a try-bite at dinner twelve hours later in the day. He has, as my mother says, one speed--and that is GO, fast. O is way more mellow, but man, that kid can be a hard head. We are currently locked in the epic battle of Hat Wearing--and lo, I will win.

It is a challenge for which I often believe I am ill-equipped. Having a dead baby makes my parenting even more difficult, because lumped in with all the usual patience-reservoir-scraping, the guilt is multiplied to a factor of infinity. But maybe I'm overestimating myself? Maybe the guilt is this heavy for everyone, dead baby or not.  I should be more, I could be more, I should be better. I swore I would be in that hospital bed almost three years ago, and many days I fall so very short.

Somehow this turned into a pity party, and that wasn't my intention. Life has been busy, life has been good. I'll leave you with this. If you see me in the parking lot of Target with my windows up and a little boy in the back seat, head on the steering wheel, you'll know what I'm listening to.

Poking My Head Out Of My Hiding Spot

I keep starting to write this post, and keep getting stonewalled before I can even get my thoughts out. After being away for so long, my brain feels rusty, the words coming out like water through and old tap. Slow, sluggish, discolored. Hard.

Where to begin when it has been so long? I look at my reader every day, the blog posts piling up, leaving me feeling like a complete jerk.

Hey everyone! Things are going PRI-TTTTTY well over here, so, like, keep on keepin on, mmmm'kay? I'll letcha know when I need you!

It's not like that. I read. And I want to comment, and say, yes, me too, I get it, I'm sorry. I feel like I keep saying the same things over and over.  But it is true. I get it. I am sad, too. I am sorry.

My grandmother died this past week. She was my last grandparent. She was 91. She was funny and crafty and enjoyed so many things in life. She was in pretty good health and outlived almost all of her friends and her husband and several other family members; I almost believed she'd live forever. Magical thinking strikes again. She had a knack for making you feel like you were her favorite, like everything you did was amazing and noteworthy.

She was my friend and I miss her, will always miss her. Even though she was old. Even though I knew she would eventually die. Even though.

E has been processing this all week. She was diagnosed with cancer a little over two weeks ago, went immediately into Hospice care and died a week and a half later. So fast, which I think maybe was a blessing to not have to suffer and worry for months, or years. But E has been asking questions:

"So GG is up in the stars? Can we visit her? Did you watch her climb up into the stars? Is she in that box but can't talk?"

And the one question that broke my heart, asked with a fleeting frown and almost tears:

"But who will be your grandma now?"

I feel lucky my boys got to meet her and know her. I feel lucky to have had her in my life.

*******
I have a confession, too. I've been wanting to write about something for awhile but just, I don't know, didn't want to come across as a bitter crone.

No, no, nothing earth-shattering or life-altering.

Right after O was born a new family moved in across the street. We have since become friends with them, and it is just lovely. E and their oldest child are six months apart and play together so well. They were on the same soccer team this spring, even.

And their adorable daughter was born in March of 2010.

I'll let you go ahead and process that math, the permutations of children and possibility and what is and what is not, and what was and what was supposed to be.

And it's cool. I'll admit every so often I'll squint a little more carefully or think a little too hard and it will twist something in my midsection, but mostly it's cool. I'm 100% positive it's because of my youngest, my O. I am not ashamed to admit he has made these living arrangements a billion times more bearable.

But then the neighbors across the street, a different yet equally lovely and kind family, just had their second child. A girl. Born just over two years after their son.

It makes me dizzy, occasionally, to look across the street and think about . . . what, exactly? How we'd be a trio of matching families if my life hadn't taken a complete shit two and a half years ago when Calla died? Because matching families--whoopdeedoo--we have two amazing boys, so, like, whatevs?

Sigh. I just don't know. Maybe I should just crawl back under my rock, stick my head back in the sand and shut up. Be grateful and sad on my own time.

Just wanted to share.

In Your Wildest Dreams

Sometimes, even often, beautiful songs become so ubiquitous that we forget what they truly sound like, or have to tell us. I blame lite rock stations. With the overplay of easy listening, adult contemporary, lite sounds--whatever you want to call it--some gorgeous music gets turned to brain mush.

Think of Stevie Wonder. The Beach Boys. Elton John. Amazing songwriters and musicians whose music is harmless enough to play in the office, but still powerful enough to make you stop in your tracks as you ponder the creation of such heartbreaking harmonies and lyrics.

This morning I went for my run with O through the cemetery, and as we rounded a curve we caught up with our deer. And its fawn. They were literally scampering around the well-manicured lawns, chasing each other and playing tag. But then the adult saw me and stopped. So we stopped and just looked, waiting. The fawn was still scampering, darting towards its parent then darting back. The big deer wasn't so sure about us, so we started up again, saying our gentle goodbyes as it watched.

But then a convergence of music and placement and happenstance caught up with me.  Our deer. Right up the hill from Calla's spot. Pushing my big almost-20-month-old boy. Listening to a song that just made sense. A song that I would have been embarrassed to admit I liked in high school, that's how uncool it seemed. It all fit together just right. And as desperately as I'm trying to find the words to capture the beauty and pain and just perfection of that moment, I can't. But maybe if you listen to this relegated-to-lite-rock song you'll hear it.

Granted, not every word of this song applies. "Our bodies felt the morning dew?" Not so much. But. "I wonder if you know, I wonder if you think about me . . . " Magical thinking, yes. Nothing wrong with a little indulgence now and then.

(Just one more song that needs to be redeemed. Maybe it already has been, you know, from Garden State. But some of these songs need to be pulled out of soft-rock hell.)

**Full disclosure: while I do not, regularly, listen to soft-rock, I do like many of the songs on those stations. It's the Celine Dion that kills it for me, truth be told.

Right Where I Am: Two Years, Four Months, Twenty Two Days.

I am participating in Angie's Right Where I Am Project for the second year. It is an incredible compilation of stories, voices, and families along this path of grieving. Please check out all the rest of the stories here. And this is where I was last year. 

Well when you put it that way it seems like a blip. Two years? And a little bit? That's nothin'.

And yet is is so very much something. Right where I am . . . well, judging by the frequency of my blog post, not HERE, so much. But where I truly am? Is kind of complicated.

Two years. And a little bit. Two years ago I was just inextricably tethered to this blog, this space, this community keeping me afloat. I was freshly grieving Calla and newly pregnant with O. To say my head was fucked is an understatement. I was barely surviving, clinging to grief and hope and the tiniest bit of sanity.

But now here I am, in a place I never, two years and a little bit ago, thought I'd ever be again.

Right now O is just the same age E was when Calla died. It is a strange place. I don't remember a lot of what E was doing at this age, and that makes me sad. They have their own distinct little personalities; okay, they have their own distinct BIG personalities. I look at O an then think back to E and wonder, what the hell was I trying to do back then? Another baby at THAT stage of the game? Hoo. But O is a different chap than E. E was all chatter and business and non-stop go-go-go. O, not so much. He's content to communicate with several little half-words, leaving us to guess the rest, fill in his blanks. He'll sit for what seems like hours amusing himself with made-up games and ideas. He is content.

Which is lovely, because when he was inside me I was anything but. I couldn't imagine what the FUCK I was doing having another baby. Daily my blood was a cocktail of anxiety, worry, hope and sheer terror. That poison pumped through my body and luckily passed right through O. He is the happiest little clam in our ocean.

Our life, as it stands, is actually pretty wonderful. Something I never, two years and a little bit ago, thought would be the case. We have fun as a family, and hoo boy are we busy. E dances (tap! so cute! recital next week!) and plays soccer, along with preschool three times a week. O and I hang out; I take him running in the stroller and on errands while E's busy at school. The days just fly by, filled with trucks and superheroes and playing. C and I manage to go out a few times a month just the two of us--granted often those dates are other people's weddings or some such obligatory function, but a child-free night does wonders for our collective married soul.

And man are those child-free nights a world away from the nights we once spent, missing our toddler at home and our baby girl in the stars.

But where I am isn't all sunshine and roses and unicorns pooping Skittles. The overriding emotion, the one that threatens to overtake sadness, is disbelief. Monday night as I manned our grill, C inside with the boys washing hands and setting the table, I looked around our sun-washed backyard, toys strewn about, mulch and sand settling into the bottom of the baby pool, and wondered how, again, did this come to be my life?

I look around at families of two children, older brother and younger sister, and feel a distinct stab in my upper abdomen. But then I look down at the strawberry blonde boy heads bobbing at my sides and can't really imagine our life any other way. This is how we are supposed to be, sadness and awfulness and all. Without Calla there would likely be no O, and that makes my already taped-together heart start to wobble.

E talks about her a lot, but I think he's just trying to make sense of it all. He has a sister who had to go live in the stars. And she can't come back. But she's his sister. And we miss her. Around and around we go, in the maddening-yet-heartbreakingly-adorable way of the almost four year old.

So she exists in our family, in a nebulous, vague sort of way. I miss that baby girl I left, lifeless, in that cold hospital room two years and a little bit ago. Fuck. I miss her with every ounce of flesh on my skeleton, every breath in my lungs, every hair on my head, every pulse in my neck. Every second of every day.

But I can't imagine it. I can't see her. I can't believe she was ever actually real, or meant to be. I look at our life now, and know this is real.

But, still, how?

Catching Up

As the title of my blog suggests, I am currently enjoying a double nap time. And, you just know that now I've typed it, someone will wake up. Which explains a bit of the hiatus I've taken. You see, the boys have a bit of an aversion to sleep. So when they actually do sleep? I need to get things done. Which means this here writing hole gets neglected.

I sit here in disbelief that it's springtime again. Maybe it's because our winter was so unbelievably, weirdly mild. Usually by the beginning of April I start getting a little overly cabin-feverish, but really we've been out and about for weeks. (Oh, and next winter? We are so effed.) But mostly I can't believe it's been two years since I found out I was pregnant with O, still freshly grieving Calla's death. It seems like it was yesterday, and last century, too. I watch the leaves peek out from the tree branches and smell the air and feel the half-brittleness of the wind and can remember, vividly, being emotionally obliterated and scared shitless. Sometimes just the sight of a daffodil sends shivers down my spine.

I am so grateful for that little sleeping soul upstairs, and for the one asleep over there on the couch. I am still in disbelief that Calla died, but sometimes even more so that E and O are alive.

********
I have a friend who this winter, had two babies, twin boys, very very early. And without going into the nitty gritty, one of the babies died recently. And I just sobbed for a week. When she let everyone know, all I could do was fall to the ground and weep. Which made me feel like I was overreacting--like it was more about me. But shit, you know? How can you not, right? I am devastated for her, and can't think of a thing to do, even though I've lived through a brand of this hell myself.

E watched me cry, and wondered. So it got us talking about where exactly my friend's baby is, why it is so sad. I told him he was in the stars, like Calla. And now, at lunch almost every day, E asks where they baby is, and why he is in the stars, and tells me he misses him. And Calla. And I tell him I do too. And then I wonder if three-and-a-half-almost-four is too young for these things, but then I think, I am too young for these things, too.

********
Life right now is nearly how I'd imagined it would be before Calla died. Chasing around two little ones, having fun but getting irritated when I haven't had enough to eat or sleep. But I catch myself, hear that almost Pollyannaish voice in my head saying, "Yes, but they're here. Be happy for that."

I have a difficult time when I find myself getting annoyed, or, heavens forbid, yelling. Yep. I sometimes yell. I do not enjoy every second of every day. And this sometimes makes me feel like a failure. As though I've learned nothing. As though I'm taking my relative good fortune for granted. What kind of mother with a dead kid gets annoyed with the children she has?

Being happy all the time, I've come to finally accept, is not possible. It is okay to be annoyed that I'm reheating my coffee for the third time; that despite bribing using all the positive reinforcement known to man my child still routinely wakes me at 5AM (no, not the baby) and I get grumpy--these things are not happy things. The fact that these boys are here, alive, breathing, hearts beating--for this I am so eternally grateful.

********
So during the time it took me to write this--not long, obvs--O woke up screaming. But with a little finagling and another go-round with the sleep sheep he's back to sleep. Which means, since I've put that in writing, he'll be up again in about four minutes. I'll try not to be away for so long.

The Robins Are Back

the robins are back,
springtime is nigh.
the sun overhead
fills the powder blue sky.

i hear their cheeping,
those chicks, very tiny.
new life, fresh and green
new eyes, bright and shiny.

springtime is coming
its scent fills the air,
i run through the streets,
sweet breeze through my hair.

the robins are back,
i hear their singing.
and on days like today
i know what spring's bringing.

at the back of my teeth
there's acid i taste.
i've fallen right in,
cement block 'round my waist.

my head swirls and bobbles,
my thoughts all a-jumble.
i run and i run
but inevitably stumble.

the robins are back,
their song mocks me so.
sun, go back in.
grass, please don't grow.

springtime, you see,
is eternally tied
to grieving, to worry
from when my girl died.

the first sun of spring
turns my body to stone.
frozen in time
and still so alone.

the robins are back,
and so is my grief.
shrouding all of my thoughts,
stealing light like a thief.

Here I Am, There I Go

When Calla died, like right after she died, it felt like my life had a reboot. Suddenly, tasks that were rote, routine, were complicated and foreign. C started making the coffee in the morning for me, despite him not being a coffee drinker. I often would forget which way to go when driving. I, for a little while, forgot how to cook and, more alarmingly, how to eat.

My entire life was shadowed by a thick fog of grief. I felt as though I was wandering blindly through it. In those early days, we got a new computer and had the house set up for Wi-Fi. C also treated himself to some wacky video game that required the player to slay these awful, screeching things. After E would go to bed we'd sit, in our television room, and exist through technology. C would play his game and I would dive into the blogs. There was one particular blog I found, and whenever I check it these days I can almost hear that screeching, shrieking sound from the game--so linked are the two in my sensory memory. The background color seems to just elicit those screams. E now has a little game for the wi.i that has a similar sound. We don't allow him to play it all that often.

And then, well, when I found myself pregnant again so soon after she died, the blogging life kept me alive. Reading about healthy subsequent babies, and the emotions attached to all that baggage, was a stronger jolt than my morning, C-made coffee. I maniacally checked my reader, often several times an hour, looking for some glimmer of hope.

When O was born, alive and kicking as he was, again my life took this crazy turn. And suddenly I had run out of time to write. Despite all this grief and sadness that still existed, exists still. Except now no one wants to hear about it. Well, that's not true. People do talk about Calla and ask me how I'm doing and most people acknowledge that things are hard sometimes. And listen honestly and unflinchingly when, on the rare occasion, I choose to open up about it. But life, now, is more complicated. I've relearned how to drive and eat and cook, but I am still, dammit, stymied by how to fit my dead daughter into my life.

If I talk about her too much--which, frankly, I rarely do, it's just too hard for me--I feel like the wailing banshee parading her dead daughter's body through the streets. If I don't talk about her often, I feel like a neglectful mother. And like I'm putting myself out there as completely FINE! I'M FINE! Can't you tell I'M JUST FINE?!

I am in a place that I, two years ago, never believed I'd be in again. I function mostly like a normal human being. This past weekend I went away with my friends for a crazy-insane-whirlwind-beyond fun weekend--without C or the boys. What? Who does that? And! I'm doing it again in a few months with another group of friends!

But then it turns, in my head, to this:

So, what you're saying here is you, lady, have not one but TWO healthy boys, a loving, caring husband, a roof over your head, you can stay home with your kids, and have not one but TWO groups of good friends who can just pick up and go away for a weekend of fun? AND! Also you manage to have people stay with your children when you want to say, go for a run or yoga class? Who, exactly, do you think you are? And by what right do you think you have to be SAD?! Like, ever?!

But see, that's just it. All these wonderful things in my life mutually coexist with this crushing sadness. All it takes is a stray noise, a click in my Reader, a picture, a memory and I'm back there, more than two years back. And I keep coming back, now to just one word: HOW?

Apology

I'm sorry I've been gone.
I'm sorry I'm still here.
I'm sorry I don't comment.
I'm sorry I comment too much.
I'm sorry I've been crying.
I'm sorry I'm not crying enough.
I'm sorry I want to leave.
I'm sorry I want to stay.
I'm sorry I want time to myself.
I'm sorry I don't want to be alone.
I'm sorry I want to go with.
I'm sorry I want to stay home.
I'm sorry I can't do it.
I'm sorry I'm actually kind of good at it.
I'm sorry I'm so busy.
I'm sorry I have nothing to do.
I'm sorry I seem happy.
I'm sorry I seem so sad.
I'm sorry I care so much.
I'm sorry I don't seem to care at all.
I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry.
Sorrysorrysorrysorrysorrysorrysorrysorrysorry.

Two For Real

Today is her birthday. Somehow this day is easier than yesterday was. Remembering that chilling, eerie feeling of knowing my daughter was dead, but not really knowing for sure, then knowing for sure . . . it was my own little horror film. Delivering Calla, waiting for the labor to be over . . . well, that was really hard. But I had a goal, a focal point, I knew the outcome.

Her delivery, sadly, was not beautiful. It was emotionally and physically the most torturous thing I hope I ever have to live through. I screamed like a mortally wounded animal and wanted with every fiber of my being to die.  I have guilt that her birth was so ugly.

So now I feel compelled to give her beautiful things. But what, I am wondering, do you give a dead baby?

Today we went here with the boys, and then when we got home I ran through the cemetery. I thought it was fitting to spend the day with children and dead people. C took the day off from work and we just put our heads down and got through it.

On my run I stopped at Calla's marker and cleared it off. I sat and had a good little cry. It was a beautiful sunny and relatively warm day. I couldn't help remember two years ago, after she died and was born, driving around the cemetery looking for suitable places for her marker. It was so very surreal. And yet, it still is surreal. Visiting my dead daughter's cemetery marker on her second birthday. That sentence has about fourteen things wrong with it.

I debated writing anything on the eff beez today. I don't want people to think I'm trolling for sympathy. But then several friends wished their living children a happy birthday today, and I thought, "what the hell." So I did.

Here we are, marching onward into our third year without our girl.

Thanks for reading. Thanks for your kind words. It means just about everything to me.

Almost Two

This is the day when every minute has historical significance. When I was making curtains, eating chocolate, getting my haircut. We had takeout tacos for dinner. I was having abdominal muscle spasms which I hoped were baby movements. I freaked right the hell out and went to the hospital.

That sonogram.

Two years ago, today, she was dead. Two years ago, tomorrow, she was born. Two years ago, yesterday, was the last day of my blissfully naive life.

The weather this January, so far, has been freakishly warm. Unsettlingly so. It is giving me that nauseating feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Or the other eight feet of snow to drop. The weather two years ago, right now, was blisteringly cold. The night we went to hospital, in fact, was the coldest day that month. And still, while waiting to deliver my dead daughter, I was waiting for that other shoe to drop.

Two years. I look back at my life, then, and am amazed by how far we've come. The milestones are too many to list. But we are a different family. I am a different person, almost entirely.

And yet she is still dead. That stays the same no matter how much we grow.

I am still caught winded by pregnancy announcements, by third babies, by little girls with curly hair and blue eyes and who are two. It stings much less now. The sting is not entirely gone.

Her death has not defined who I am, but it is maybe the most real part of me. It is immoveable, unchangeable; it is woven throughout my speech, my thoughts, every action.

It is all I have of my daughter. And I miss her so very much.

Handle With Care

I wonder, sometimes, why I continue to be surprised by how insensitive people can be. Maybe I should just hide myself away in a cave, far away from anyone else and their opinions.

Often I'm caught off guard by how fragile I still am, and continue to be, even nearly two years away from my baby girl's death and birth. How just a suggestion can shatter me completely.

And then the strange bedfellows I keep really send my head spinning. First the Duggars, and now Rick Santorum? Who AM I?!

So, this morning on msnbc dot com there was an article about the Republican presidential candidate, a list of facts the public might not know about him. And right there, at number four, was the requisite family blurb. Within that bullet point was the fact that his third baby died at 20 weeks gestation. And then he and his wife brought the baby home so their living children could meet him, and cuddle him.

Now, people, please. I'm not going to get political here. However, Mr. Santorum shouldn't, nay, CAN'T count on my vote. But I do empathize with him on this point. The path he travels is quite different from mine, socially-speaking.

But how beautiful for his living children. I wish, now, I'd been able to give E that same gift. He will literally have no memory of his sister, her life, her body, her weight, her black curly hair.

So anyway. This morning I had the pleasure of reading someone's opinion of this particular bullet point, expressing how "creepy" it was of the Santorums to let their living children meet their deceased baby sibling. And immediately I wanted to puke and punch something. (I did neither)

Sigh. Just another example of how people just don't get any of this. Just another way for me to feel like a freak. Just another reminder that we are a motley crew, we mourning parents, and there simply are no boundaries separating any of us. We are all connected through dumb shit luck, forever.