spilling and cleaning

The past three days I have had the pressure of tears behind my eyes that refused to spill over. This morning I re-read every baby shower and condolence card we ever received. I took out Nina-Lou's coming home outfit, smelled it, rubbed it against my cheek. I looked at her footprint and remembered that awful night. And I wept. A lot.

I'll never hold her again. Some days I miss her so much, and the horror of what happened to us vibrates so vividly in my mind.

I've still never dreamt of her. I hope to someday.

I wish she were here. I wish she were 8 months old. I wish these were tears of happiness and not of grief.

She gave me wonderful and beautiful gifts. But it still hurts. I try to keep that hurt wrapped up nice and tidy these days. But sometimes it spills out, gets messy.

I'm better, I'm worse. I'll never be the same. Holy crap, I miss her.

6 months

This week has been a whirlwind of preparing for my first level comprehensive exams. Nina-Louise has been there, floating in the periphery, but I have been preoccupied. My brain doesn't work the way it used to. Higher reasoning and memory are compromised. I worked hard this week to cram as much information in as possible.

And now it's over and done with. And it's a beautiful day. And I'm so relieved. And my baby is supposed to be 6 months old, but instead she's a memory. A feeling. That beautiful light that streams through the trees before the sun sets.

We miss her still.

5 months

She would have been 5 months old now. The babies who were supposed to be her peers, with whom she was supposed to grow up and discover the world, are getting big and learning to crawl and playing together and smiling and cooing and drooling all over the place. My poor baby. She missed so much.

the long haul

It has been so long since I've written.  I have thought about it.  Meant to.  Set aside the time, then done other things.  I have been busy, but mostly I am not sure what to say.  I have lots of good days now; they are far more frequent than they were even a couple of months ago.  I also have shitty days.  Lonely, dark days, when I look ahead at the expanse of my life without Nina-Louise and I feel so lost and tired.

Mother's Day came and went.  I prepared myself for it.  I braced myself, and it wasn't so bad.  A good day, even.  Lots of wonderful messages from friends and family.  Acknowledgement.  I planned my day out well, and I knew that reminders would be everywhere.  Most of it rolled right off my back.  I have found that if I can foresee challenges, and I can prep myself, I do ok.  It's the unexpected shit that takes me out of commission.  The glimpse of a woman jogging with a baby in the same jogging stroller I researched and sweated over and eventually asked my mom to buy for me.  Hearing my mom-friends planning baby outings.  Seeing a classmate with her baby who was born two weeks after Nina-Lou was born and died, and how everyone crowded around her in a bubble of pure joy.  The tag for a baby bonnet I bought for her weeks before she died, unexpectedly tumbling out of my purse.  A pregnancy announcement (or two or three...).

What is getting to me now is just how never ending this grief is.  It hurts, still.  Every little thing that reminds me of what happened and how lonely and childless I am HURTS, and I just have to fucking take it.  There is nowhere to put it, nothing to do but endure, endure, endure.  It's fucking endless.  There is a maddening quality to this purgatory in which I find myself.  I remember, when we were in the hospital, after Nina had been born, and her body had been taken away, and my friends had left, and I had changed out of my hospital clothes and into my coming home clothes, I remember sitting there on the edge of the hospital bed and just thinking to myself... fuck.  Dammit, I thought I was done with these feelings.  I thought it was going to be over, and now it's even worse.  I'm still here, in this shitty place.  What a nightmare.  Now that the shock has worn off and I have accepted this fate, I thought it would be easier.  And in a lot of ways it is... but mostly I am just more accustomed to it.  This time, now, after the shock, after the searing heartbreak, after the condolences, after all the flowers have withered and died, this is the real shit.  The long haul.  Carrying this burden... forever.  Like Turner said to me, several weeks ago, as we discussed what things might be like for us if we have another baby someday, "No matter what, we're always going to be the people who's baby died."

The weird thing is, now I can't even imagine what that would be like to parent a living child.  I have been studying for my comprehensive exams, and that shit is time consuming.  I can't help but think, "how the fuck did I think I'd do this with a newborn?"  I guess I would have just done it, like people do.  But it seems crazy.  Like she was never supposed to be here in the first place.  And when I think that, I want to slap myself for it, because OF COURSE she was supposed to be here.  We changed our whole lives to accommodate her, making room.  Now that space is still there, still fairly empty, but slowly getting filled in with other things, shit we don't want to have time for, but do.  It seems so crazy and foreign to me that we ever thought we were going to bring home a baby.  I see pregnant women at my chiropractor's office, and they go past their due dates and worry about induction and drug free births and emergency C-sections, and then, there they are, a couple of weeks later, holding a baby.  It surprises me, every time.  It's lonely to be a person who's baby died.

I don't feel strong.  I don't feel brave.  I don't feel like I want to carry this anymore.  But what other choice do I have?

A great fear that I have is that, years from now, I'm going to look back at this time in my life and find that I wasted it with sadness and self pity.  I don't want to waste it.  I refuse to, actually.  I know that I have to find the right balance of including myself socially so that I maintain relationships, and so that I don't miss out on my friend's lives, but also protecting myself from things that might send me into a tailspin.  Sometimes I think I can do something and it ends up to be a mistake, and other times, I think I'm going to regret doing something, and I am so grateful that I did it, because it was awesome.  I do a lot of second guessing and visualizing and self-talk these days.  I also cry in bathrooms and wear waterproof makeup.  Ya never know.

I think I'm going to be ok.  I think this will get easier.  I'm alive.  I'm relatively healthy.  I love my family, my friends, and my sweet husband.  I love my city.  I love my dog and my kitties.  I love the career path I have chosen and I love to help heal people at my school clinic.  I love TV and movies and books.  I love the woods and the sea and beautiful clothes and cool makeup and good music and wine and chocolate and laughing at ridiculous shit.  Keeping myself busy helps.  But sometimes, no matter what I do, the sadness catches up with me.  The darkness is always there, waiting in the wings.  Sometimes I just have to let it wash over me and lose myself in it for awhile.  For fleeting moments, at the bottom of that despair, everything will snap into focus and I will feel Nina-Lou's absence and presence and my life after and my life before all at once, and I can envision what this long haul might look and feel like.  But mostly I just feel really alone and I need hugs and TV and a good book and strong coffee.  I should write more.  I feel better towards the end of this post than I did at the beginning.
 
I had a dream on the morning of Mother's Day in which Turner and I had a baby boy.  He was so sweet.  He would pull himself up on the railing of his crib and telepathically let me know that his diaper needed to be changed.  Or maybe he said it aloud.  I'm not sure.  There were other fucked up things about the dream, like we had left him alone while we were at work and then suddenly realized that wasn't such a good idea, and at one point I left him teetering on the edge of a shelf and managed to grab him before he slipped off... and as I was about to post to my mommy group, to ask if anyone could recommend a nanny, I suddenly realized that I wasn't sure if our baby was real or not.  I was embarrassed to mention him, lest people realize I was caring for a pretend baby.  But it felt so good to be his mom!  It felt so good to hold him and change him and see him smile at me.  He knew I was his mom and it was deeply fulfilling to look into his eyes and feel how close we were.  But I knew that he wasn't real.  I knew it was ok to leave him alone or let him rest precariously on the edge of a shelf because nothing can really happen to a pretend baby.  It was disappointing, but at the same time kind of thrilling.  Just me and my secret, imaginary baby.

Having a baby in the future seems like a dream, much like my pregnancy with Nina-Lou seems like a dream.  I'm always going to be a mother to a dead baby.  Always, always, always.  Sometimes I light a candle for her, and when I do, I always light a candle for Future Baby.  I want that imaginary baby to know that there is space him or her in our lives.

We will somehow make room for both.

And in the meantime, we will be alive and try not to waste it.

some days

Some days I think about how Nina's death has forever changed me, and I feel ok about that. I feel like there is something beautiful about that thread that weaves through and marks everything with its color.

Other days, like today, I think it's fucking bullshit, and that there is nothing beautiful or poetic about tragedy. It's awful, and I would do anything to hide this ugly hole it has left in me. I would like to hide behind a veil forever, change my name and my past and erase this meaningless, fucked up horror that I carry with me everywhere.

Some days I'm terrified by the notion that I'm always going to be a person whose baby died.

4 months gone

4 months ago today, our daughter was stillborn. I wish I had more time to write today, to talk about how deeply I still feel her absence, how painful and yet sometimes empowering the process of healing can be, and how lonely it is on planet My Baby Died.

Yesterday I read a quote on Glow in the Woods, posted by a woman who was 8 years out from the loss of her son. It said, "Your absence runs through me like a thread through a needle, and everything I do is stitched with its color."

I wish she had lived. I wish it so much.

carrying it

I haven't updated here in awhile, and it is not due to any lack of FEELINGS; believe me, there have been a shit fuck ton of those.  It's mostly due to feeling totally overwhelmed, and not really having the words, or the energy to find the words.

I started going to classes again last Monday, and holy crap, it was HARD.  Despite my efforts to put the gossip train in motion, there were still quite  few people who had no idea we had lost the baby.  I had multiple people approach me and say, "congratulations!"  And then I watched their faces fall, and watched them fumble for the words, and watched the utter shock and disbelief they were facing in realizing that, yes, babies die.

Part of me wanted to feel indignant over this assumption that everyone makes, that babies live and life goes on happily.  This has happened often enough, to enough people of ALL walks of life, that I don't really think it should be as shocking as it is.  But, the truth is that no one really talks about it.  It's scary, and upsetting.  When I was pregnant with Nina-Louise, I heard whispers here and there, stories told in hushed tones of tragic endings to happy pregnancies... but any time I allowed myself to think about (or god forbid TALK about) the possibility of something going wrong, I immediately shut it down with the rhetoric I had been told: it is SO very rare.  Less than a 1% chance.

Let me tell ya.  Less than 1% sounds a lot lower than 1/160.  The odds are very high that someone you know, probably more than one person you know, is going to lose their baby.  It is sad, it is awful, and it HAPPENS.

Our culture is not great with death.  We have lots of euphemisms we like to use, like, "He's with Jesus," or, "We have an guardian angel watching over us now," or, the always helpful, "She was just too good for this world."  But the cold facts are that our bodies are complicated and fragile, and sometimes something horrible happens, like a car hits it, or something just randomly goes wrong inside, like a bunch of cells decide to go apeshit and turn into cancer. And then the body stops working properly and sometimes medicine can't do a fucking thing about it.  I hate how little control we actually have, as opposed to how much control we would like to think we have.  But it happens.  Spouses die.  Parents die.  Pets die.  And even innocent, beautiful babies who you think would have a whole life ahead of them fucking DIE.  None of what I'm saying right now is intended to detract from the truly tragic reality of losing a loved one.  But tragedy happens, and until you've experienced that tragedy it is very easy to use euphemisms and find profound things to say to try and make the bereaved feel better, but there is a certain amount of value in just letting the bereaved be sad and fucked up for awhile, because what happened to them is sad and fucked up.

BUT.  I also used to be a person who had not experienced real tragedy.  I knew that some babies, OTHER people's babies, sometimes died.  But I was fairly certain that mine wouldn't.  And I would have absolutely been one of those sad people approaching a bereaved mom under the unwavering assumption that, since she wasn't pregnant anymore, there was undoubtedly a beautiful, funny, cute, chubby baby somewhere of whom I could ask to see pictures and videos.  I would have continued to smile encouragingly as this poor mom fumbled for words, and then I would have felt my heart break for her as the reality of what she was saying slowly seeped in.

I truly wonder what my face looks like as I try to find the words.  I have a spiel worked out in my head, but it never comes up fast enough.  I'm sure it will, with more time and practice.  And there are always the tears.  I can never stop them from coming every time I have to say it.  Yes, I had the baby, but she was stillborn.  She didn't make it.  She died.  Yes, we have a lot of support.  Yes, it's very hard.  No, no, don't feel bad for asking.  I probably would have done the same thing.

It's all pretty exhausting.  But I'm managing.

I also broke up with my therapist, which is a whole different story.  She just didn't get what I was dealing with, and she wanted me to keep coming to see her to work it through.  But she said things that I couldn't get past, and the trust was gone, and I had to move on.  It really sucked, because this happened at a time when I was feeling particularly lonely with my grief, and I realized that even this lady who I fucking PAY to hang out with me and listen to my problems really didn't get it.  So, I have a new therapist now, and so far, I like her.  But, I have to admit, I'm not terribly trusting these days.  I hope it works out to be a good relationship.  It's expensive and I'm not really sure where the money is going to keep coming from, but I know I need it.  This is just too hard to manage alone.

The weekends are depressing.  I try to keep myself as busy as possible, because those big open spaces in the day just should not fucking BE.  It seems like everywhere I look, all my friends and neighbors are spending their weekends as a family, cooking out, having play dates, and here I am, fucking bored.  I know there are a ton of things I can do, but the fact is that all I really want to be doing is caring for my baby.  And any free moment I have in the day is a cruel reminder of just how open my schedule is, how meaningless my commitments seem, how pointless all of this seems without a child to care for.

When I truly decided that I wanted to have a kid with Turner was during the off season from roller derby.  I had been SO busy up until then, practicing 4 times a week, classes 4 days a week, a massage practice on the weekends, working out whenever I could, away games, home games... my plate was full.  Then, the season ended, and after the first couple of weeks of reveling in all my free time, I started to feel like... is this it?  Is this all life is without all of these outside commitments?  I mean, roller derby is awesome, but it's not something one can do forever; it takes a toll on your body.  In those quiet days in the winter, I realized that ultimately that the meaning in my life comes down to family and relationships; these are the things that will be there forever.  Love.  It's simple, and it's pretty damn cheesy, but it's true.

It feels so frustrating to have found what that next step in life is, and not be able to take it yet.  I want to be a mom.  Yes, I understand that I AM a mom, technically.  I have a daughter.  But she died.  So, being told, "But you ARE A mom!" kinda feels like the participation trophy I got at the end of every soccer season.  Way to show up, kid!  I am a mom to a canister full of ashes.  It's not exactly the way I envisioned it.

I'm learning how to carry my grief.  It's big and unwieldy.  I really fucking wish that I could just put it down for a minute, or pass it off to someone for an hour or two, but I can't; it just doesn't work that way.  Sometimes it's incredibly overwhelming, living with the knowledge that I will carry this grief forever.  The other night, Turner and I went to a support group, and Turner talked about how he thinks about Nina-Louise all the time, and about how his final thought on this earth is probably going to be of her.  And I wished that because his grief is just as heavy and terrible as mine, that it might make it easier for both of us, like we could carry the same grief and share the load.  But his pain is his own, and mine is my own, and we each carry the pain separately and differently, and all we can do is commiserate about how hard it is, and maybe share what is working for one of us in a certain moment.

Despite our separate experiences, I always know that, even in a crowded room, I can look to Turner, and give him a sad smile from underneath the immense beast on my back, and I'll see him reflect the same expression back to me, as he struggles to carry his own burden, and we both know that, at the very least, that weight we each carry is love that we share for the baby we never got to raise.  These days are kind of dark, and really tough, and the pain changes from day to day; sometimes the grief is lighter than others, which I hope is a sign that maybe someday it will lighten significantly, or that maybe my muscles are getting strong enough to manage.  Lately it feels like we're just slogging through it, putting one foot in front of the other.  The minutes and hours and days tick by, and we try our best to remember to laugh, to enjoy what we can, but it doesn't come easy.  It's work.  We're getting through it, but we're tired, and we really just wish that our baby had lived.  

just like heaven, just like a dream

I didn't write these lyrics.  But I can't get the fucking things outta my head.

"Show me show me show me how you do that trick,

"The one that makes me scream" she said

"The one that makes me laugh" she said

Threw her arms around my neck

"Show me how you do it? And I promise you, I promise that I'll run away with you."

"I'll run away with you."

Spinning on that dizzy edge,

Kissed her face and kissed her head

Dreamed of all the different ways I had to make her glow.

"Why are you so far away?" she said,

"Why won't you ever know that I'm in love with you?

That I'm in love with you?"

You, soft and only, you lost and lonely,

You, strange as angels, 

Dancing in the deepest oceans

Twisting in the water

You're just like a dream

You're just like a dream.

Daylight licked me into shape

Must've been asleep for days

And moving lips to breath her name

I opened up my eyes.

And found myself alone, alone, alone above a raging sea

Stole the only girl I loved

Drowned her deep inside of me.

You, soft and only,

You, lost and lonely,

You, just like heaven.  

Written by R. Smith, S. Gallop, P. Thompson, L. Tolhurst, B. Williams

still

I wonder if I will ever stop being so sad.

I know that I give an outward appearance of basically having my shit together.  And there is absolutely a trend towards "better" happening.  I wear makeup now.  I put effort into my appearance.  I crack jokes.  I don't talk about Nina-Lou nearly as much as I used to.  I don't cry in public anymore.  I am enrolled in classes which start on Monday.  I took on an internship.  I work out.  I wear new clothes. All of these things are good.

But I still cry most days.  I still think about my daughter all the time.  I still feel complete and utter anguish at the thought that we struggled for so long to carry a pregnancy to term, only to lose the baby in the very end.  I will never, ever be excited about a pregnancy again.  I will forever assume that any pregnancy I carry is doomed.  I am still fucking empty and alone and I hate all of it.

3 months out is a weird place to be.  No one talks about my baby anymore.  I feel like it is easier for people to pretend she didn't exist than to acknowledge her life and death.  I am filled with righteous anger and indignation when I feel her being ignored, yet, most of the time, I say nothing.

And fucking Mother's Day is approaching.  Not looking forward to that one.  I plan to sleep and drink my way through it.

I am still sad.  My baby died and I wake up with that truth every single morning.  I fear that my sadness is overstaying its welcome in the land of the living.  I feel like a constant reminder to my friends of just how shitty things can be.  I am a walking worst case scenario.

It still hurts.  It still feels like a big empty nothing that tears through me and leaves gaping holes in its wake.  It aches and it burns, and the fury I feel at the injustice in all of it is silent and utterly lonesome.  The reality of my life as a bereaved mom is so overwhelmingly sad, and that sadness is so big, that if I let it all in, I fear I may choke and die.

Ultimately, we all grieve alone.

It's fucking hell.

I miss her.

I spent a relatively short amount of time with Nina-Lou. And I spent all of the time that she was alive without ever once looking upon her sweet face.

But I miss her.

It's strange to miss her, even though we never got to do any of the things I wanted.

Today is a beautiful, blustery, rainy with patches of sunshine day. It would have been a wonderful day to bring her to the park. To show her how the wind gently caresses our faces and moves the branches. How the dog stares at the ground with her head cocked to the side, before pouncing and digging. How the birds sing to each other in a strange rhythm we don't understand.

I sometimes feel her soul with me in moments like this. Today I am not sure if she's here or not. But in any case, my arms are empty.

pretty things

This Saturday, March 29, it will have been 3 months.  I anticipate this day with both relief, and dread.

Relief!

Because PRAISE THE BABY JEEBUS time does pass, life does go on, and I have survived this ordeal thus far.  It has been so, so hard.  It will continue to be hard.  But I am getting better.  Every week that passes is a triumph and a miracle and a step towards being a person who does not live in utter misery and pain.  I am so relieved to still be standing and still love myself and still have a great relationship with my husband.  Thank fucking goodness for him, for me, for US.  When we left St. Luke's the night of December 29th 2013 with the emptiest of arms, I had no idea what to expect.  I knew it would be hard.  I knew that I could not possibly fathom the pain I was in for.  I was terrified.  I worried that I might kill myself, that I might push away everyone who ever loved me, that I might just become totally unhinged, evolve into one of those poor women you hear discussed in hushed tones.  "... just a shell of a person now... never fully recovered... never the same..."  But HI GUYS I am alive, and relatively healthy.  It amazes me.  Do I still experience utter fucking misery?  YES.  Just yesterday I cried to Turner that I wish someone would smack me in the face with a two by four; anything to feel something different, to put me out of my misery.  I hate those moments.  I know that they will pass, as that one did, but this shit is HARD.  And to be honest, there is some truth to those hushed tones.  I am not shell of a person, and I do believe I can recover from this in a way, but I will NEVER be the same.  I am slowly figuring out what that means and how to incorporate this tragedy into the tapestry of my life.  I have survived thus far with a blind faith that if I wake up each morning, white knuckle through the most suffocating moments, laugh when I want to laugh, cry when I want to cry, and essentially just submit to the grief and its process, that I will survive and come out the other side.  That blind faith has given way to something more and more real, as I catch glimpses of joy and hope and feel more and more like a whole person again.

Dread.

Because NO.  No.  Please, no, don't let this really be happening.  Don't let me get any further away from holding my daughter's dead body, because every second that passes between then and now is another step away from her.  The chance that some miracle might happen and that I might find some way to go back in time and undo all of this becomes less and less plausible.  Some might argue that going back in time was NEVER plausible, and those people are... technically correct.  But tell that shit to a grieving mother, who reaches out to touch a bassinet by her bed that isn't there.  Who deeply breaths in the scent of a coming home outfit that was never worn.  Who has touched, smelled and even tasted her dead daughter's ashes in some attempt to be near her again.  Who lights a candle day after day in some futile attempt to express a mother's love.  I've done all those things.  The reality of being a bereaved mom is the only one that I know, yet it still feels wrong.

I wrote awhile back about book 5 of the Anne of Green Gables series, in which Anne's daughter dies.  Montgomery, the book's author, also experienced the tragedy of a stillborn baby, and holy shit, did she nail it on the head.  That feeling of experiencing the brightest and most blinding of joys, only to suffer a loss so suffocating and empty that all you can do is wail in agony.  It's cruel, this loss.  I hate to give the pain a personality, because I hate to give it more power than it should have, to make it seem personal, or to martyr myself in any way.  But I does sometimes feel like a villain that wraps you in a warm hug, only to stab you in the kidney.  Montgomery also talked about how Anne came out the other side; she does make it through, and she finds the ability to smile and feel joy again, but there is always something in her smile, after losing her baby.  Something that wasn't there before.

I can relate to that.

I can be filled with both relief and dread.  I can be happy and still be kinda sad.  I can have moments of despair sandwiched between moments of hope.  All of this is ok, and normal, and the reality of our lives after Nina-Lou.

Nina-Lou.  I fantasized about speaking that name.  Singing it to rouse her from a nap.  Calling from another room.  Even shouting it, firm, staccato, and fierce.  Now I just speak it wistfully.  I whisper it as I light a candle at night.  I say it aloud to myself, hesitatingly, sometimes feeling a slight presence on the other end of the words, sometimes feeling a huge, disappointing, dreadful nothing.  It's usually the latter.  She's dead.  It's awful, and man, it hurts.

I want to write about other things.  About the superficial things that day to day life is full of, the everyday things that make me happy.  Like the eyeliner I started wearing.  The exercise I have started doing.  The furniture I want to buy for the kitchen.  Color palettes.  Food.  Coffee.  Fashion.  A new purse.  I might start to write about these things more, if it feels right.  I do love these things, these pretty, delicious, thrilling, rich things.  But for whatever reason, this is not what falls onto the page when I sit down to write.

I am busy, busy, busy drawing and shading in the details and nuances of this new smile of mine, but the picture is still unclear.  I stand further and further back, squinting my eyes, trying to see the whole thing, but it's a blur.  When I'm not trying too hard, when I soften my vision and catch a glimpse of it out of the corner of my eye, almost by accident, I can see it.  The whole thing.  It is there and it is real, and all of the crying and the laughing and the screaming and the steps forward and the falling backward and the getting back up and falling back down is all worth SOMETHING.  Her life and her death and my life, it all may not have happened for a reason, but it has to be meaningful in some way.

I'm going back to school in two weeks.  I'm scared and excited.  Relieved and dreadful.  Happy and sad.

Moving forward, but always looking, wishing, and yearning backward.

happy birthday

Yesterday was my birthday.  I am 36 years old.  

I feel much, much younger than 36; I feel like I have eons left to live.  

I also feel far older.  I have lived through shit that most of my ancestors never experienced.  I am fucking ancient.

It's weird to be in this place and to be celebrating.  I did celebrate.  It was fun.  I received so many well wishes, which was also strange.  It seems terribly out of place to have people smiling at me and telling me "Happy Birthday!" when I'm living through what is undoubtedly the worst time in my life.  

But, always the attention whore, I liked it.  People were correct in assuming that I would want to find happiness on my birthday despite the tragedy of losing Nina-Lou.  I didn't feel guilty about it, like I might have a month ago.  I drank wine outdoors.  I skated in the park.  I laughed with friends.  I got sunburned.  I stuffed my face.  I indulged in expensive lattes and fancy chocolate.  All of this was truly GOOD.  

She was there, or rather the void she left behind her was there.  I missed her so much.  I had really looked forward to this first birthday as a mom.  I had planned on hosting a picnic, and inviting everyone I knew to come celebrate with us.  Bring your kids, bring your dogs, bring everyone.  Let's be grown up mom-women and enjoy ourselves and bask in the wonder and joy of our new lives.  

Things didn't turn out the way I had imagined.  It still takes me by surprise.  I still sometimes can't believe that we had a baby, that we ALL built this beautiful, welcoming space for her in our lives, and she died.  I can't believe she died.  

Turner took me to my favorite Ethiopian restaurant in Berkeley on Sunday night, the night before my actual birthday.  The food was great.  I enjoyed Turner's company immensely.  As we drove home, the sun had recently set, and the sky was a steely blue that reflected on the bay, and the lights of San Francisco twinkled in the distance, and the moon rose up full and yellow behind us as we crossed the Bay Bridge, and it was a beautiful night, and my heart broke all over again, like it does again and again every day since she died.  I didn't cry.  I am used to the feeling by now.  I'm a lot tougher than I used to be.  Or, at least tougher than I had to be.  I don't want any of this.  The universe takes what it will.  I am tiny, powerless, insignificant.

Here's to many, many more birthdays to come.  Birthdays better than this one.  I believe they exist.  

Here's to Nina, and all the other babies who died before they should have.

I miss Nina-Louise.  

I miss my old life.  

We are trying hard.  

We are doing ok.  

We are strong.

We are a mess.    

Cheers.

after

Last night I bought the Anne of Green Gables series.  I loved the books as a little girl, and I have been wanting to read them again.  I wanted to lose myself in something mildly familiar and comforting.  But what I really wanted was to read book 5, Anne's House of Dreams.  I am starting with this book because I know what happens: Anne marries Gilbert, moves into the house of her dreams, gets pregnant, and delivers a stillborn daughter.

I don't remember if I know this because I actually read this one when I was young, or if someone told me what happens.  I am not actually sure if I ever made it through all 8 of the books in the series.  But I have been thinking about Anne, and kind of... worrying about her, in a strange way.  Poor Anne, having to go through this.  The writer of the Anne series, Lucy Maud Montgomery, suffered a stillbirth.  She had three children, all boys, and the second was stillborn.  It really bothered me, upon reading her Wikipedia entry, that the stillbirth of her son is only given one sentence.  I am sure she was forever changed by the death of her son, like I'm changed by the death of Nina-Lou.  I saw my life going one way, and then it made an abrupt turn, not just in another direction, but into another reality.

Everything before is so different from everything after.

On Saturday night, I wanted to watch The Royal Tenenbaums, largely because I wanted to see how the person I am now would relate to the film.  I find myself wanting to re-experience all kinds of things in this new reality.  Life is so different now; sometimes more dull, sometimes more vivid.  Sometimes it is so vivid that I can't stand it and I have to look away, shield my eyes behind dark glasses and stare at my phone for too long.  And sometimes it's so dull that it smothers me in dry ash, stopping up my throat and caking in the pits of my eyes and I have to try desperately to drag myself through the day under the weight of it.  I admit that there are still times that I want to die rather than live in this.  But I know these moments will pass, and I have neither the true will or the stomach to hurt myself.  There are times when I think it would be nice to just lie down and let the avalanche of pain bury me, but no matter how long I lie, the pain fails to do me in.  So I get up and do stuff.  I prefer life, anyway.

I'm only about 9 chapters into Anne's House of Dreams, but knowing what's coming, and knowing that Montgomery also knew what was coming as she wrote it, the whole book becomes so heartbreaking.  Right now, I'm in Anne's "before".  When she knows that she is the luckiest woman in the world, to be with the person she loves, in a beautiful place, surrounded by things that make her happy.  Anne's before is a tad more romantic than my own, but I know what it is to feel blessed.  And I am so sad for Anne that she is going to find out that she really isn't, that no one is.

I don't believe in god, or believe that any deity blesses anyone.  The idea that some people might actually think that god or the universe or some sort of omnipotent being has chosen to bless them rather than me and my husband just really fucking pisses me off.  You are not blessed.  You are lucky.

The really fucked up thing is that I felt that way once.  Although we had little by way of money or material things, Turner and I have been lucky to find each other early in life, to both have been raised by parents who love us deeply and would do anything for us, to have been well educated and to be surrounded by a community of wonderful friends.  I suffered through my 3 miscarriages and then got pregnant with Nina-Louise and I thought that my suffering had served a purpose.  I thought that maybe the universe was bringing me what I needed at just the right time.  When I was about 6 weeks pregnant, when we knew the pregnancy could very well end up to be a miscarriage, we ate dinner one night at the little Vietnamese restaurant up the street, and I got a fortune at the end of the night that said "Luck is coming your way."  I saved it, and I still carry it in my wallet.  At the time, I was really hoping it was true, and there are times now when I still feel that way; when I hope that maybe I just haven't gotten to the luckiest part of my life yet.

I hope I haven't used up all my luck already.  I hope that the after can have times that are as good as the before.  I know it will be different.  I know I will always see things through the lens of bereavement.  But I want to feel lucky again.

absence and presence

I wake each Sunday knowing that another full week has passed since we lost her.  It has now been 9 weeks and 3 days.  When I think about where she would be right now, what she would be doing, what our lives would be like... to say it breaks my heart only demonstrates how inadequate our language is at expressing true grief.

I wish, with the most magical of thinking, that I did not have to be a mom to a dead child.  I wish I could look into her eyes, which I imagine would sparkle and crinkle at the edges when she smiled, like her dad's.  I can see her smile, goofy and mischievous.  I can feel her tiny grip on my finger, and picture how her dad and I would laugh and marvel at her amazing brute strength, despite her petite size.  

Turner and I went out to lunch last weekend at a small vietnamese restaurant near our apartment.  It's a little bittersweet, going to this place.  It is filled with neighborhood regulars; mainly couples and families.  It is brightly lit and bustling, but laid back and easy.  It's a good place to bring a baby or a toddler.  Pho is my favorite food, and I wanted to share it, along with all the other delicious and beautiful and funny things in the world, with Nina-Lou.  I knew she would love it all, like I do.  Turner and I sat and ate and laughed a little and slurped our noodles, and every once and awhile a moment of silence passed in which we knew that the both of us were feeling her absence, which is so palpable that it is almost a presence.  It IS a presence.  We feel her with us, all the time.  It's eerie, and comforting, and profoundly sad.  

The other day, I transferred her ashes to a small, airtight canister.  It's not fancy, but it's sturdy and won't shatter if it gets knocked down by one of our cats or in an earthquake.  Her ashes, the only physical remnants of her corporal body, are safe in there.  To keep them safe is the least I can do.  What is left of her amounts to about a quarter cup of fine ash and tiny chunks of bone.  I was deeply struck by their beauty; the colors of her burnt bones were a combination of the most delicate pastels and grays.  I feel lucky to have them.  When we first lost Nina, I wasn't even sure if I wanted them.  But having her remains, here in the apartment with us, we feel a weird kind of completeness.  We had considered scattering them, but we can't.  We need them close.  

It doesn't bring her back.  It doesn't bring her any closer.  We can talk about her and feel her presence and run our fingers through her ashes, but she is dead and will always be dead.  All we can do is miss her.  Some days it hurts more than others.  But it always hurts, at least a little, every minute of every day.  

forward

I'm trying to focus on self care these days.  Right after we lost Nina-Lou, taking care of myself was the last thing on my mind.  I barely ate, and when I did, it was a few chocolates from the box someone brought over in an attempt to assuage our grief.  I found pleasure in drinking coffee and that was pretty much it.  A few weeks out, when Turner and I had taken some time to discuss what we were going to do moving forward, and had decided that we wanted to try again, I realized that I would have to lose the weight and get my body healthy again, in order to hold a pregnancy.  I didn't really give a shit about myself, or feel any confidence in my body to do anything the way it was supposed to, but I wanted a baby bad enough to start going through the motions.  So, I joined weight watchers.  I started running.  I cooked meals from scratch.  I went to acupuncture and brewed the disgusting tea.  I took my vitamins.  I tried very, very hard to care.

But, to be honest, I just really fucking hated myself.  I was fat.  I was a failure.  I was a sad person who cried all the time.  I was a sob story that people tell in hushed tones.  I only found the strength to try and get better because my friends made me feel loved, because my husband made me feel so special, and because I had a deep, gnawing desire to be happy again, and maybe, hopefully, be a mom.

I had a conversation with my massage therapist about how we dress ourselves when we're feeling low.  I had showed up to her office wearing some pieces of jewelry that make me feel good: a feather earring that I lost the match to years ago, a jade ring my friend Mercedez sent me, and a delicate necklace that my friend and Sharla gave me right after Nina died, which has the letter N, Nina's birth stone (turquoise), and a little angel wing.  She commented that she liked my accessories, and I said that I wasn't really wearing them to look pretty, but because they made me feel stronger.  I went on to say that it felt strange that, for the first time in my life, I had very little interest in adorning myself; I kind of wanted my drab appearance to reflect how shitty I felt.  She then told me about a book she read about Native American dress, and how in that culture, the way in which one adorns oneself with clothing, jewelry, makeup, etc., is an important reflection of what one is experiencing inwardly.  This is why it's kinda fucked up when hipsters wear headdresses; that headdress was never meant to be a fashion statement.  It was meant to be a reflection of someone's emotional being.

I had been laboring under the notion that I had to start making myself look better so I would feel better.  But after this discussion, and after giving it some thought, I realized that I was really not ready to start feeling better.  I wanted the world to see my pale lips, my limp hair, my tear stained cheeks, for these things were reflections of my pain, and hence, my love for my little girl.  I knew that I would eventually feel the desire to spruce up my appearance again, but I felt comforted by idea that there was no reason to rush it, and that I was justified in my public mourning.

But those happy moments do creep in.  I did, as the days went by, start to notice beauty more and more.  I had promised myself that I would do this; look around at the world and take it all in, for her, but I found it so difficult at first.  I was too sad, to disappointed.  But as time went on, I found myself awestruck at the light filtering through the trees at the park, or at the patterns left in the sand by the waves.  I started to care, despite myself.

So I started going through the motions a little more easily.

I am still pretty sad when I wake up in this new normal as a bereaved parent trying to pull her shit together.  But I drink my coffee and I joke with my husband and I walk the dog, and it doesn't feel quite as futile as it once did.  I am actually happy about some things.  I look forward to cooking a nice meal for dinner.  I laugh out loud with my friends when shit is really funny.  I make jokes and I don't feel like a fake asshole while I'm doing it.  I eat a little piece of dark chocolate every night, and it tastes pretty fucking good.  I wash the tears from my face and put on pink lipstick and smile at myself in the mirror.  I don't hate myself.  And I don't pity myself, either.  I have been through some fucking hard shit, and I'm not completely broken.  Partially broken, yes.  How could I not be?  My kid died, which is a nightmare.  But, it's not a nightmare.  It is my life.  I will always be Nina-Lou's bereaved mom.  Any subsequent children I have will not be my first born.  I am THIS person now.  I'm not the person I expected to be, and it hurts.  But, fuck it.  I gotta to work with what I have.

I will never be grateful for her death; Nina's death will always be wrong, and always be a tragedy.  But I am eternally grateful for her life, even though it was only spent in my womb.  I am so grateful for experiencing that kind of love.  It stabs at my guts and rips me apart and makes me cry in front of complete strangers, but I feel no shame or remorse or loss of dignity.  I am crying for her, and if anyone else felt the love that I feel for that little baby, they would understand that my tears are the most meager of offerings; it is a wonder I don't cut out my heart and offer it, purple and pulsing, up to the heavens.  Instead, I weep, I grieve, I love, and I live.  I don't buy that Nina would have "wanted" me to do this, but I do understand that this is the way life is.  Time keeps moving forward.  The seconds keep ticking by, and we can't freeze it or go back no matter how badly we wish to.  Forward.  Forward.  It's not cruel, it's not fair, it just is.  The special and the meaning are things that we wring from life with our scratched and calloused hands because we are strong, we are loving, and we are human.

The Good Shit.

I realize that this account of my life probably makes it look like I live in a constant state of despair and agony.  And, to an extent, I do.  The darkness of losing my kid has made a deep and permanent mark on my soul that will never, ever go away.

But there is also light.

I remember in the very early days after we lost her, as I was coming out of the shock and accepting what had happened to us, I found no joy in doing anything.  It was like the whole world had been coated in a fine layer of ash; there was no luster to anything.  I felt strongly that it was important for me to look around me and find beauty in the world, for HER.  I wanted to experience life that much more fully because she couldn't.  But I was too fucking sad.  Food didn't taste right.  Jokes weren't as funny.  The ocean, in all of its vastness and enormity, was just a depressing, gray expanse that made me feel small and helpless.

But, miraculously, I have started to find joy again.  It's work, but there is still so much good and so much beauty left, even in the World in which Nina-Louise Dies.

February 14 was the second full moon since we lost her.  I stood outside and basked in its light.  It was only for a minute, but I really saw it and felt it, like I used to.  I love the moon.  I don't know why.  Call me a hippie, I don't fucking care.  I think it's kinda magical.

Two nights ago I was out with our dog, Riggs at about 10 pm, letting her do her business one last time before bed.  Turner had made a last minute run to the store 2 blocks away to get coffee, which we had just realized we were out of.  Riggs spotted him walking back and bounced up and down on her two hind feet, her tail a blur.  I took the bag holding a dog turd and shook it in Turner's face, which made me laugh so hard that I had to stop and double over with my legs crossed so that I wouldn't piss myself.

Yesterday, in the middle of the day, I treated myself to a plate of lox, Humboldt Fog cheese, and arugula, and followed it up with a piece of dark chocolate and a glass of wine, all while watching Keeping Up with the Kardashians (omg, Kanye's proposal, y'all...).  This was after crying in front of and being hugged by two complete strangers, but I thoroughly enjoyed that plate of yummy things.

And there's PregNation.

PregNation is a group that my friends and I started because two of us were pregnant, two of us were thinking about getting pregnant, and one of us had just had a baby.  It started as a group text between the 5 of us, and has evolved into a GroupMe of 18 women, the majority of whom have kids, who post random shit throughout the day and night regarding topics that range from recipes, pregnancy, developmental milestones, dead babies, live births, skating, breastfeeding, torn taints, pants shitting, and farting into one's own vagina.  Anything goes.  After Nina-Louise died, I really wasn't sure if I could still be a part of this group of women, and it broke my heart.  I felt so left out of all the fun, and I didn't want to ruin the party with my tragedy.  But my lady friends made it clear that my story was still relevant, still important, and they made me feel accepted.  They make me laugh a lot throughout the day.  Occasionally, I have to turn the notifications off so that I am not blindsided by a gorgeous picture of a breastfeeding baby, or a video of something adorable.  It's not that I don't like those things, but if I'm having a fucked up day anyway, I try not to torture myself with reminders of what I lost.  However, even though I am sometimes filled with jealousy for what some of them have and I don't, I always get to be my sad, happy, tragic, crass, weepy, laughing self.  Because I'm all those things.  I haven't figured out yet what I am going to be like as I evolve forward into The Bereaved Mother Who Has Healed.  But I have a feeling it's something like I was before, but maybe more rich and complex.  I will never look at Nina-Lou's death as a blessing, but I do feel like loving her is a gift that has enriched my life and my very being.

My therapist said to me that tragedy cracks you open, and makes you see and feel things more acutely.  She's right.  I am so changed from this, and ultimately I hope it's for the better.

The best thing, the thing that I love the most, is sad and sweet and happy and precious all at once.  It happens in the middle of the night, when my dog is snoring, and it's quiet enough that I can hear the waves crashing on the beach a few blocks away.  After over a decade of sharing a bed, Turner and I have a pretty solid routine: when one person wakes up and rolls over, the other automatically rolls over as well.  We do it unconsciously, barely waking as it happens.  But lately, every couple of nights or so, when I roll over, Turner will stay in the same position, and wrap his arms around me, burying his face in my neck or my hair.  Sometimes we kiss, and murmur I love you's, and sometimes not.  But we always lie there for a moment, our arms wrapped around each other, feeling the warmth of each other's bodies, feeling so deeply sad, and so deeply grateful for what we have despite our loss.  In those moments, I feel simultaneously overwhelmed with grief and with love.  It's a precious, nearly indescribable feeling; one which only those who belong to the Tribe of Bereaved Parents will ever fully experience.  It is the only perk to belonging.

Seeing the world, knowing in my heart of hearts what I love and how much I love it, being true and raw and exposed and letting the light pour in during my darkest moments... these are gifts I never would have known had I never had her.  I am broken, but I am slowly becoming whole, reforming into an entirely new shape.  There is good shit out there, and in here.  She changed me, as all of our children change us.  I will never get to see her grow up, struggle with her teenage years, teach her to knit, take her for walks with the dog and let her play with pinecones in the park.  But I am still changed.

Her life came with her death, and those two things are the greatest gifts and the darkest tragedies of my existence.  

the hardest thing

Last Saturday, I had to attend a CPR and First Aid training, as a requirement for school.  There was no getting out of it or putting it off; I had to do it if I want to work in the clinic next quarter.  I cannot possibly express how much I did NOT want to do this, and not just because it was at 9 am on a fucking Saturday.  Attending this training meant that I was going to be in a room with people from my school, most of whom last saw me at the end of fall quarter, 37 weeks pregnant, happily riding off into the sunset to spend winter break gestating away.  Thanks to the rumor mill (which I made sure to move along at a breakneck speed in the wake of Nina's death), I was pretty sure they all knew that my baby died.  But I couldn't be sure.  I also just didn't like the idea of having to participate in something so banal.  Having to do something so... normal.

The further I move through my grief and get on with my life, the further I move away from her, and it rips up my insides a bit.  I don't know whether to be grateful for moving on and making it through the day without crying, or desperate to go back to those sharp, early days.  It's a confusing, tumultuous, complicated experience being in limbo like this.  I don't relate to the happy person I was before she died, I can't be the person I expected to be if she had lived.  To be honest, I just really don't know how I'm supposed to be.  I didn't have a contingency plan for this.

Before I had ever gotten pregnant, before this whole chapter of my life started, I was a pretty free wheeling girl.  I liked to eat and drink and scream and be thrilled.  When I started to contemplate becoming a mom, I actually got really excited about the prospect of reconciling the wildness in me with the nurturing mother in me.  I thought I was gonna make a pretty rad mom.  Me and my little one were going to unleash ourselves on the world and experience all of it.  Then, with the miscarriages, my confidence started to fade a bit.  I was so sad.  I was in such a dark place.  I wanted to be that person I had envisioned so badly, and with each loss, I became more and more fearful that it would never happen.

But Nina-Lou brought me back.  Once I made it through that first trimester and still had her growing in there, I became filled with a hope and a happiness unlike anything I had ever felt.  I was so sure of everything when I had her with me.  I saw and understood the trajectory of my life, and I was so confident in who I was and where I was going.  Waiting for her to be born was the happiest I have ever been.  I found meaning and symbolism in everything.  It was all meant to be.

Turns out that was all bullshit.  But I digress.

The training on Saturday was just as boring and cheesy as these things always are.  The class was taught largely by video, the production value therein leaving much to be desired.  They did blow a lot of their budget on a pretty sweet dude on fire that they saved for the end.  The rest was silly and giggle worthy.

Then we got to the infant CPR.

I didn't see it coming at all, which may have been for the best, because if I had had time to worry about it before hand, I probably wouldn't have come.  Or had a panic attack in anticipation of it.  I just hadn't even considered that we were going to be learning to save babies.

But there it was: a bag of babies.

With their arms and legs flopping, and their plastic faces all wearing the same sleeping expression.  They looked dead.  It was a fucking bag of dead babies.

As they were passed around the room, I started to internally panic.  My heart raced and I felt dizzy.  I wondered what people around me were thinking.  Were they worried about me?  Embarrassed for me?  Equally horrified?  Or were they just happily oblivious, failing to make any connection at all between me, my formerly swollen belly, and those lifeless dolls?

I told myself, over and over, it's just a doll, it's just a doll, it's not a real baby, it's not her.  I felt tears welling up behind my eyes, and realized that my hands were visibly shaking, and I very seriously considered leaving the room.  But then, the pragmatic part of my brain took over.  Would I explain to the instructor why I was leaving?  Would I come back for the rest of the training?  Would they be able to give me my certification if I didn't save the dead baby doll?  Would I get my money back?  Would I be able to find another place to complete the training before the start of Spring quarter?  And, of course, there was the public humiliation to consider.  Did I really want to make a scene?

I took deep breaths.  I talked myself down.  I disassociated myself from the experience and went through it, emotionless.  At one point, I looked down at the baby on whom I was performing chest compressions and thought, I wonder if this is about how big Nina-Louise would have been by now.  It was so awful.  It was the worst thing I could have possibly put myself through.  But I didn't die.  I didn't cry in front of everyone.  It was painful and difficult and horrifying, but I managed.

Later, alone in my apartment, I screamed as loud as I could.  I screamed and screamed and cried and pounded my fists on the coffee table until they hurt.  I wanted to impale myself on something.

This is my life now.  White knuckle through the painful bits then lie on the couch while my husband rubs my back silently and I sob into a pillow.  It's fucking depressing and it makes me feel helpless.

I want to go back to the person I was before, but I can't.  I want to clamber through a window into The World in which Nina Lives, but that ain't happening either.  I would, at the very least, like to fast forward to the person I will be as the woman who has survived the death of her only child.  But there is no fast forward, no rewind, no do overs.  I just have to live through each day.  Some days are ok.  Some days I laugh and I see the beauty around me and I know that I am me and she is she and that we have different paths, and that I will someday be a mom to a different baby; one who lives.  Other days are dark and exhausting and empty and really, really fucking hard.  It's the thing that should be impossible but isn't.  Somehow, I am making it through this; not because I'm strong or because I am finding closure or because I miss her any less.  I am making it through simply by being alive and adapting.  Human beings, it turns out, are good at suffering.

I never knew.

...

Today I'm just sad.  I don't have anything inspirational or profound to say.  I just wish she were here and she's not.  I feel so lonely without her.  I had so many hopes for our future as a family.  I never imagined that I would be a mother to a dead baby.  There are reminders all over this city: all the places I ate lunch with her in my belly, the place where I was going to go for breastfeeding support, the shops where I hopefully bought her little things, the parks where I imagined we would go together.  It all hurts.  I had so many hopes for her future.  I wondered what kind of an adult she would grow up to be.  Whether she would like sports or not.  What kind of person would she fall in love with.  Would she want to be a mom someday.  I miss her so, so much.  It is so unsatisfying to miss her like this.

I don't know what to do with myself.  I don't know how to be without her here.  I feel so lost.

stitches

I have gone running for the past 4 days in a row.  I feel I should put that in quotes: "running".  In reality, these outings consist of 3 minute intervals of jogging interspersed with walking.  But whatever, I'll take what I can get.  It's pretty amazing what exercise does for the mind.  I have felt different, and better over the past few days.  I would even venture to say that for moments I have felt... good.  Seems weird to say that.  It's been 6 weeks and 3 days since I lost Nina-Lou.  Too early to be healed.  Too early to be better.  I know there are more bad days to come; it's often at the peak of feeling like I've reached a new threshold of healing when I suddenly get thrown back down into the muck.  But hey.  Like I said: I'll take what I can get.

I still carry the thought of her with me all the time.  She's always, always, always on my mind.  Nearly everything I do, I wonder what it would be like to do with her.  Or I think, "I would not be doing this if Nina were here," and those kinds of thoughts really make me feel terrible.  These are things that I should enjoy, like getting wine drunk or sleeping in late.  Before I lost her, when I was still pregnant, I would think to myself that it was important for Turner and I to enjoy this last final part of our lives as a twosome.  And here we are, still a twosome, and I deeply resent having the time and space for those things that only the childless can enjoy.  Fuck those things.  Gimme the sleepless nights, scabby nips and cradle cap.

I don't have to be back in school until April, and I'm grateful to have this time to grieve.  I'm grateful that if I want to spend the afternoon reading blogs by people who have lost children, I can.  I can go "running" every day.  I can take my dog to the beach and look out at the ocean and think about how tiny I am.  I can watch the sunset and take a mental picture of it for Nina-Lou.  I can cry whenever I want, pretty much.  I feel so strongly that it's important for me to surrender to the grief and let it take me where it needs to go.  I know that there is a certain amount of suffering in this that just needs to happen.
I don't know how people go back to work right after this kind of loss.  Turner went back to work a week after she died.  He said he wanted the distraction, and it seems to have been good for him; I sometimes envy his ability to work despite his grief, but I just have to remember that we are different.  I was and am too consumed to be distracted.  I look back on those first several days after she died, and I remember that I wasn't able to even turn on the TV or the radio.  I managed to read a little bit at a time; that was just consuming enough for me to let my mind go from the torment of dead baby dead baby dead baby.  But after awhile I'd have to put the book aside and let the sadness of it fill me up, and cry and cry and cry.  I was still so shocked by what had happened, for weeks.  The reality of it would sometimes hit me all at once, and it was just crushing; I was hardly able to breath under the weight of it.  Shock was a friend to me.  It kept me from crumbling.  Although I think I would have liked to crumble; it would have been a relief to just collapse into a heap.

But not now; these days, it feels good to stand up.  I don't know if I'm just getting more accustomed to her not being here, or if I'm just more used to the sadness, but it all feels a little more manageable.  I grudgingly attribute it to the exercise.  I find it both reassuring and annoying that our minds are influenced so deeply by the chemicals in our bodies.  I would rather think, "my kid died and that is the greatest tragedy that can possibly happen, so therefore I am the saddest person in the world."  But then I do something as simple as running for 30 minutes, and the darkness lifts, and I can think about what I'm going to make for dinner and whether or not I might be able to fit into my skinny jeans soon ("skinny" jeans, let's be real).  It makes my emotions seem a little less valid to know how much they are influenced by hormones, and that pisses me off.

Hormones.  Those dicks.

Then, there are all the other little things that are helping me heal. There is therapy.  And friends.  And my sweet husband.  And our dog, who is the best, sweetest, funniest dog who has ever lived.  And this blog.  I have not been able to put a finger onto what it is about writing here that is so therapeutic for me, but I feel compelled to do it in a way that I have never felt compelled to write in a journal.  There is something about the public nature of a blog that sets it apart from journaling (something I have never been very successful at as an adult, although as a teenager I scrawled all kinds of narcissistic drivel into many a spiral bound notebook); there is something about sharing the experience with others.  I think that losing my daughter just broke me completely open, and there was no holding in the absolute anguish of it.  I was so wasted in the wake of her death, and I did not have the strength to be stoic, or have people think I was ok when I knew I wasn't.  I am changed.  I am not the person I was before.  People should know.

And, quite frankly, I wanted people to fucking suffer along with me.  I got real sick, real early, of hearing people say that they COULD NOT IMAGINE what I was going through.  Well, here.  Let me describe it in great detail for you, so that you can fucking imagine it.  I want people to understand that this magnitude of tragedy is not just a nightmare, it is real, and it happens, and it is a horror show.  Be incredibly grateful for what you have, because it FUCKING SUCKS to lose it.  And it also sucks to have to leave that tragedy behind you and find some semblance of normalcy again.  To sleep and wake and eat and have sex and walk the dog and jog and do all of the things necessary to live a normal life, and use your bare hands to claw away the shit in order to find the joy buried in all of it, all the time knowing that you are broken but that you are slowly stitching yourself back together, and to somehow have faith that life will feel worth living again someday.  It's horrible, and maybe it's selfish of me to want others to see and feel how shitty it is, but I don't care.

I just loved my daughter so much, I don't know how I could possibly hold it back.  I remember when I first fell in love with Turner, I really understood what people meant when they said that they loved someone so much that they wanted to shout it from the rooftops.  I wanted to shout it out and tell the world how much I loved him.  I was bubbling over with it.  With Nina... I just never knew that much love was in me.  And it's overwhelming and bubbling over, but it's all mixed up with the pain of not having her here.  And I'm broken and shattered and my love and my pain and my anger and all of it has just been strewn everywhere.  I want to shout from the rooftops that I LOVED her and I MISS her, and LOOK HOW FUCKING SHATTERED I AM since she died.  She is supposed to be here and she's not, and my understanding of the irrefutable truth of her death leaves me with an emptiness inside of me that I will never be able to fill.  I hope that the emptiness shrinks down a bit; I hope that I can stitch up the edges around it as I stitch myself back together, but I hope it never goes away.  That emptiness is all I have left of her.

There is a balance to all of this.  And I am slowly, slowly figuring it out.  I have surrendered to the process, and am letting it take me where I need to go.  If nothing else, I have learned that life is short and precious, and a fucking crapshoot.  Success and happiness can be hard fought for and even won, but it can all disappear in a flash.  No one is blessed.  No one is cursed.  Some are lucky and some are not.  But we all have to keep trudging through the shitstorm in order to find a lucky break.  And when we find it, it doesn't hurt to just sit, and let the sun shine on our faces for awhile.

Ain't no sense in squandering that shit.

waves

Last week, Thursday, I went a full day without crying.  I was amazed.  I felt sad that day, and I saw things of Facebook that were upsetting (this, by the way, happens every time I look at Facebook, but I still do it), and I felt worried about whether or not Turner and I would ever have a baby, and I missed Nina and felt her profound absence in our lives.  But the tears never came.  I went through my day to day activities and I didn't break down or need to hide my hideous, dark sadness.  It was just there with me, but it never pounced.  I carried it silently.

Then Friday came, and the fucking shit hit the fan.

It started with my acupuncture treatment in the morning.  I was going through my various symptoms with the intern at my school clinic, discussing my appetite, my body temperature, my bowel movements, etc.  And then I burst out with, "this is just the shittiest fucking experience of my life and I am so sad, " and as I said those words, tears poured out of my eyes, and I couldn't stop.  Her supervisor came in to check my pulse and go over the diagnosis.  This supervisor is a teacher at my school, an adorable, tiny, elderly chinese woman who taught me medical mandarin during the time when I was pregnant for the first time, before the miscarriages had started and before I knew how bleak life could be.  She was kind and asked me questions about how much blood I lost during delivery, and she told me to take care and that they would put together a good herbal prescription for me (a dank concoction that is burbling away on my stovetop as I type).  I really kind of wish she would have said something consoling, like, "I'm so sorry your baby died," but she didn't.  They left the room and I cried more.

I weighed myself on the scale out in the hallway and the number from last week stared back at me, stupidly the fucking SAME, and I cried more.  I sent Turner a text to vent, and then I followed that up with one that said It's bullshit.  I'm so frustrated.  I hate my stupid life.  Then the intern came back to treat me, and I put my phone on silent and threw it in my purse.  I laid face down on the table and sobbed tears and snot onto the floor through the face cradle, afraid to wipe my nose because of the needles in my wrist.  When she came in to check on me 15 minutes later, I had to ask her to stop the treatment early; I just couldn't lie there crying onto the floor anymore.  She thought my nose was just stuffed up, and she was concerned that I was getting a cold.  No, I told her, I'm just crying a lot today.  She was silent but I felt her concern.  She gently massaged my back after she removed the needles.  It felt good.  I breathed.

When I got out of the building and looked at my phone, I was confronted by a series of increasingly panicked texts from Turner, the last three of which read Will you please talk to me?  Where are you?  Do I need to come home?  Sweet T-bone.  I called him and caught him before he was about to hop on a bus.  He hadn't realized that I was getting a treatment.  Poor guy thought I was gonna off myself.  Or something.  I scared the shit out of him and I felt horrible.  We talked and he went back to work.  We texted back and forth while I sat in the car and rain beat down all around me.  I cried and felt sure that we would never have another baby, that Nina was my only shot at happiness and that I had ruined it.  I felt deeply sorry for myself.

I cried myself out, and then decided to stop by Trader Joe's for groceries.  That stupid mantra of dead baby which has come and gone since she died was going full force in my head.  Dead baby dead baby dead baby.  I wanted to be on my first shopping outing with the baby.  To be struggling with a shopping cart and a baby in the rain.  To be laughably unprepared and stressed out and trying to manage life as a mother of a newborn.  I'm not that at all.  She is just not here and it's so strange.  Life is surreal and familiar all at once.

Right after Nina-Louise died, I kept having this feeling that maybe it was all a nightmare.  I sincerely felt that it might be.  Faced with such an irreversible, horrifying reality, my mind went to crazy places.  I am a little ashamed of my childish desire to just shut my eyes and have it all be changed as I opened them.  But I hear that it's natural.  I wish so much that she had lived.  I wish it so hard.  Friday, in the rain, putting my groceries in my car in the Trader Joe's parking lot, that feeling came back to me strongly, and for a split second I entertained it; considered that there might be some way I could take a sleeping pill or meditate my way into my real life.  Wake up and find myself still pregnant, having been taught a profound lesson about gratitude and love.

It's not a nightmare.  It really happened.  I have to heal.  I have to keep living and moving forward.  It's the hardest thing I ever imagined.

Later that night, after a few more crying jags and half a bottle of wine, Turner and I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark and I allowed myself to get lost in the fantasy of the film.  It felt good to get swept away.  And when my mind started to settle back into dead baby dead baby dead baby I thought about our next baby.  I thought about my darkest fear, the voice in my head that tells me that I'm cursed with a desire to have a child that runs deeper than any other, and the inability to do so.

And then, I did something a little crazy.  I decided that was a bunch of bullshit.

I decided that, no matter what, I am going to be a mom to a live baby.  I decided to believe in that reality beyond any other.  I will have a baby.  I will have a baby.  I keep telling myself this, and it actually comforts me.  It allows me to mourn Nina-Louise without getting that all mixed up with mourning the life I wanted for myself.  I had been laboring under the thought that, in order to heal from this, I needed to confront the fact that I may not ever be a mom.  Reconcile the mother I wanted to be with the mother I am.  But, honestly, I am not ready to do that.  Right now, I need to believe I am still going to be that mom I wanted to be.

Last night, one of my good friends gave birth to a beautiful baby boy.  We had been pregnant together, our due dates only a few weeks apart.  Nina came 2 and a half weeks early, tiny and dead, and her boy came a week late, 9 pounds of alive.  As her due date came and went, I started to realize that, along with my obvious jealousy of her excitement and joy at the inevitability of meeting her baby, I was terrified that her baby was going to die.  I was so scared that I was a bad luck charm, and that the horror of my life was going to rub off on her.  That her baby would die and she would always secretly blame me for it.  After we got word that he had come, alive and healthy, I breathed a huge sigh of relief and admitted to Turner this fear I had been secretly harboring.  As soon as I said it out loud, I realized that it was silly.  Life is neither fair nor unfair; it just is.  And although looking at the picture of her sweet baby makes my heart hurt because loving the two of them makes me feel my loss so acutely, it also gives me a strange feeling of hope.  Maybe next year that little guy can meet my little one.  Maybe I can get through another 10 months of pregnancy without losing my mind.  Maybe I can deliver a baby and hold him or her in the moments after birth, and be amazed that I did it.  Maybe, maybe, maybe.

I looked at the picture of my friend in the moments after her birth, her exhausted face and the tiny baby with his mouth full of boob, and I stared and I stared and I stared.  It filled me with the warm tingly feeling of love and desire that I get whenever I see new babies -- a sensation I've experienced my whole life, even before I had ever been pregnant or was sure I wanted to be a mother -- and it filled me with so much longing.  Longing that my birth could have gone differently.  It brought back memories of what it was like, giving birth to Nina-Louise.  I am so proud of myself for what I did: I endured the pain of childbirth, knowing that my daughter was dead.  It was so hard, and it pains me that I can't share my story in the same bragging, amazed-at-my-own-strength way that mothers of live babies get to.  I am amazed that I did it.  I am amazed at the pain of childbirth; that red hot wave that you have to ride until it crashes out on the other side, and then prepare yourself for the next.  I'm amazed at the way it felt as her body gushed out of me.  Right after I pushed her out, even though she was dead, I still expected to hear a chorus of congratulations, because I had done it, the seemingly impossible!  I had known that women who lose their babies at term still have to birth the baby, and that fact had always been a sobering, nightmarish idea, but I had faced the fear and the pain and the work, and yet the room was filled with a horrifying silence.  It was like, until then, no one else had been sure of the reality of Nina's death.  But there she was.  Dead, dead, dead.  Birth is so primal, and when I was pushing, I became an animal.  The push came from somewhere else.  I couldn't stop the force of it, it was so strong.  I was something else in those final moments, and I think I let go of the reality of what was happening for a few minutes.  I was so relieved to feel her come out, that I was actually a little surprised at the silence that followed.  But the truth is it was not a happy birth, not the kind of birth you brag about in passing.  I like to think that people, especially my closest loved ones, are strong enough to hear my story along with the happy ones.  And I know that it is valid and true, and deserves to be told.  But I'm not sure if it's right.  I am not sure that Nina's birth story belongs alongside the birth stories of live babies.  It might have to stay hidden away, and that saddens me.

However, I must admit, I am getting used to this life on the other side.  I am less and less shocked that my baby isn't here.  I am less and less surprised at the way my heart grips tightly in my chest when I see things that remind me of her.  I am actually, really, starting to move forward.  It sometimes makes me feel sincerely guilty, but it mostly makes me feel relief; getting a glimpse of how I might be able to get through this is hugely comforting.  It is so difficult.  It is such a roller coaster.  But the dips and turns are coming a little less frequently and sometimes I can even see them in the distance and steel myself before I get thrown.  My god, I miss that baby.  I miss her so much.  But, as my therapist reminded me last week, although I feel like Nina is a part of me, she is also her own person.  I am me, and she is she, and we have different paths to follow.

I finished Cheryl Strayed's Wild last night, and I related to so much of what she found throughout the course of her life, in reconciling the death of her mother and integrating that into who she was from then on.  It all comes back to life just HAPPENING.  It happens and we deal, and the suffering and the happiness and the work is all ours.  I also discovered that Cheryl Strayed has an advice column called Dear Sugar, and someone on a baby loss blog posted a link to a very poignant response she wrote to a woman who had lost her baby to stillbirth.  I copied and pasted a paragraph of it into the notes on my phone so that I could reference it when I need to.  It says

You will never stop loving your daughter.  You will never forget her.  You will always know her name.  But she will always be dead.  Nobody can intervene and make that right and nobody will.  Nobody can take it back with silence or push it away with words.  Nobody will protect you from your suffering.  You can't cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away.  It's just there, and you have to survive it.  You have to endure it.  You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.  Therapists and friends and other people who live on Planet My Baby Died can help you along the way, but the healing -- the genuine healing, the actual real down-on-your-knees-in-the-mud change -- is entirely and absolutely up to you.  

Below this, in the notes on my phone, is another one, that I wrote.  It' says You are going to have a baby.  You will be the mom you want to be.  Stay positive and believe in yourself!  I have looked at this note several times since I wrote it in there two days ago.  It brings me comfort to know that it's up to me.  I know that I am not through with mourning Nina, and that dark days will still come and I will still cry and I have a lot of work ahead of me.  I miss her.  I love her.  I can't ever entirely let her go.  But I am choosing to believe that I can still, despite her death, be the mother I want to be.

I am me, and she is she.

I am still so lost without her, without the possibility of her.  It hurts me so deeply to know with absolute certainty that any baby I have in the future will be a different baby; even another little girl with dark curls and beautiful lips will be someone else, with a different name and a different future.  I find both comfort and pain in that fact.  She's gone and we're here, and there is no answer to the question WHY.  It just is.  It just IS and there is no going backward.  The future is a vast unknown expanse and there is nothing left to do but live it.

Medusa

There's so much darkness in me these days.  I would love to say that Nina-Louise brought nothing but light and joy into my life, but the fact is that her death has left me very broken.  I try and eke out joy from occasions, from meals I like, from the beauty I force myself to see out there in the world, but it is exhausting.  I feel sincere love for the people with whom I've surrounded myself, and my relationships with them do assuage the pain.  But joy is buried and only emerges for fleeting moments.

Yesterday was Turner's birthday.  We went out to dinner at one of our favorite restaurants, Nopalito.  We sat at the bar.  We had drinks.  We laughed.  We spoke closely and intimately with our hands resting on each other's thighs.  We kissed.  We enjoyed each other's company.  To anyone watching, we must have looked like our life together is pretty rad.  And honestly, it is.  Except for that our baby died, and a huge piece of our hearts feels like it's gone forever.  And as much as I enjoyed this moment, I felt that dark empty spot gnawing inside me.  It's just the two of us.  Just the two of us.  Nina is supposed to be here and she's not.  Oh, fuck, it hurts.  Goddammit.

As we were getting ready to leave, a pregnant lady walked in, and my heart sank, and my stomach felt queasy, and everything I had achieved and then lost was right there in front of me, and I wished I were dead.  I cried the whole way home.  Poor T-bone.  Happy birthday, buddy.  Let's just sit in the car and sob for awhile, cool?

I don't hate or feel resentment towards pregnant women, or new moms (unless they treat their kids like shit, in which case I pretty much wanna rip their faces off).  I used to, when I was going through my miscarriages, but not now.  I am not sure why.  Maybe because I've been a pregnant woman, and I know what I went through to get that way, and what I will have gone through if I end up that way again.  But who knows.  I do, however, feel jealous.  Deeply, intensely, pathetically jealous.  I am jealous of the innocence in a pregnant woman knowing her swollen belly will result in a screaming baby.  I'm jealous of the love with which a mother looks upon her child.  I'm jealous of a living room cluttered with baby shit.  I won't ever have that with Nina.  I may not ever have that at all, and that thought makes me feel so fucking sorry for myself that I just want to crawl under a blanket for the rest of my life.  It fills me with a darkness and self-loathing so potent that I don't even want people to look at me.  I'm fucking Medusa.  I will destroy you with my sadness.  

And, honestly, I fear for pregnant women.  I constantly worry that they are being too lax.  Too much like I was.  Too trusting that the universe wouldn't dare take that child away from them in the end.  As much as I love and appreciate the community of bereaved mothers I have found in the wake of Nina's death, I am now burdened with the knowledge of just how much can go wrong.  Preemies who die in the NICU.  Perfectly healthy babies who get sick and die within hours of being born.  Babies who suffocate, suffer brain damage, and die in hospice.  Heart defects.  Cord accidents.  Beautiful, healthy, LOVED babies who die in their sleep for no reason at all.  It all happens.  It doesn't just happen to people on the news.  It happened to me.  It could happen to any one of us.  Even if I get pregnant again and have a perfectly healthy baby inside me and carry it to term, any one of a plethora of tragedies could befall us.  Already having experienced the worst won't protect my baby.  It also won't protect me from getting cancer, or having my dog mauled by a coyote, or my husband hit by a car, or having a child who later gets killed in a war, or shot on the street.  It's all so arbitrary, and the universe doesn't bless certain people and curse others.  Some of us will suffer and some won't.  There's no rhyme or reason to any of it.  The shit could hit the fan at any moment.

But despite all that, my desire to be a mom is so intense and acute that it takes my breath away.  People tell me that because I had a daughter and I loved her, that I am already a mom.  In a sense, I believe that.  But she died, and I didn't really get to be a mother to her.  I never held her in my arms while she was living.  I never dressed her in an outfit that I chose.  I never put her in a baby carrier and gently kissed the top of her head while shopping in a grocery store.  I never felt her drink from my breast, or put her warm skin against mine.  I never bathed her or felt her perfect, tiny little hand clasp around my fingers.  I held her dead body and it was not the same, no matter what anyone says.  I didn't get to be a mom; at least not the mom I was supposed to be.  It hurts in a way that is tortuously painless.  I want to give birth to her again and again just to fucking feel something other than this empty nothing.  It's crazy to want something that feels like it should be right there beyond my grasp and know that it isn't.  I'll never have her back.  I'll never get to be her mom.

We will keep trying.  We will follow through with all the tests and see if this is in the cards for us.  So far, no one can find anything wrong with me, other than that babies thus far haven't thrived very well inside me.  I will work all the angles, from the western doctors, to the acupuncturists, to the chiropractors and the mayan abdominal massage and the fucking Reiki healers. We take comfort in the fact that we made it pretty far with Nina.  As hard as it is to know that she had a chance at life and died anyway, it does give us hope.  I will nurture my body and make it as hospitable an environment as I can.  If we get pregnant again, and it lasts into the second trimester, I will be monitored closely, will undergo no less than 20 ultrasounds, will possibly inject myself with blood thinners and steroids, and I will most likely be induced or have a c-section.  I don't care how it happens.  I don't care that it will be the most stressful 9 and a half months of my life.  They can slice me open, pump me with drugs, whatever it takes.  And if none of that works, we will start the adoption process.  I want that fucking baby; the one who lives.  I know it won't be Nina, and right now, that stings.  But I have to keep trying, because don't know if I can live in a life that doesn't let me be a mom.  As unattainable and imaginary as it seems, I still think it's something that I'm meant to do.  I am not cursed.  I am not blessed.  I'm just a woman who has been dealt a shit hand.  Life is neither fair nor unfair, and I am going to do my damnedest to get what I want.

Fat.

I'm fucking fat.

The whole time I was pregnant, I openly worried about how big I was getting, but deep down I really didn't care.  I knew it would all be worth it.  Plus, I had that awesome jogging stroller that I was gonna take Nina out in.  She would sleep peacefully while I jogged away months of flab.  I would attend postnatal yoga, connecting with my child, and my breath, and the earth.  And OMG breastfeeding!  It burns so many calories, I really wouldn't even have to worry about the baby weight!  And what was the hurry, anyway?  I would have a beautiful baby girl, all I've ever wanted.  I was sure I wouldn't even mind being overweight for awhile.  I knew it would come off eventually.

Well.  Expectations change.

I DID drop 20 pounds of baby, blood, and various other bodily fluids in the first couple of weeks since Nina-Lou's birth, but I still have 30 pounds to go, and they have been stubborn thus far.  It sucks.  I am still wearing maternity shirts, because all my other shirts are fucking crop tops at this point.  I have one pair of non-maternity jeans that fits over my muffin top.  I have a saggy gut, which, if I'm not careful to suck in, looks pretty much like an 18 week pregnant gut.  I get winded jogging for more than a minute, and I doubt I could pull off a legit pushup.  I feel gross.  I feel old.  I feel trapped in someone else's body.

I walk down the street, and I'm not a big pregnant lady, I'm not the woman with a newborn still carrying some of the baby weight, I'm just a fucking fat lady.  A 35 year old, childless fatty who has been wearing variations on the same outfit for the past 6 weeks because nothing else fits.  I know I'm not ugly.  I know that it's not the end of the world and that I can lose the weight.  But I am bitter.  My body has been changed from this experience, and not for the better.

Oh!  And as a sweet bonus, I have become one of the many women who must cross her legs when she sneezes, lest she fucking piss herself.  So, yeah.  Total pity party, over here.

I know how to lose weight.  I've done it before.  When I moved to the Bay Area in 2004 I weighed 205 lbs, which, at 5 foot 6 inches, is pretty much considered morbidly obese.  I joined weight watchers as a last ditch effort to get healthy, and lo and behold, was able to drop a shit ton of weight.  I have, for the most part, maintained that weight loss for many years.  Pregnancy scared me, because I knew I'd get kinda fat again.  And I did.  I maxed out at 210.  I knew a lot of that was baby, but it turns out that most of it was me.

So, I'm back on the weight watchers train.  I'm doing a couch to 5K program.  I am skating again.  And I'm pretty sure I'm gonna drop this weight just like I did before.  I have all this extra motivation now because if I'm gonna get knocked up again at some point, I have to get back down to a reasonable weight.  That shit is going to take some time, effort, and discipline.  But I know I can do it.  Aside from making a baby, I've pretty much always accomplished shit that I want to do.  It's not hard; you just have to be willing to work for stuff.  I wish that were the case with baby making... but, not so much.

I don't want to be worrying about weight loss.  I want to be worrying about breastfeeding, diapering, nap schedules, and baby-wearing.  I got so cheated out of so much when Nina-Louise died.  I hate the way my life turned out.  I believed that my life was going to end up a certain way according to my vision, my plan.  I was wrong.  I feel... duped.  I feel so stupid and sorry for myself, it's sickening.

My friends are pretty amazing, though.  They listen to me bitch, hold me when I cry, or just sit with me in awkward silence while I stare blankly at the ground.  They join me for walks, and read my texts late at night when I just have to tell someone that I'm sad.  They believe in me.  They love me.  They love my daughter and they hold onto hope for me and Turner and the family we want to build.  They feel angry for what we lost and they tell me they have my back.  I love them for it.  I feel like a large part of why I've been able to survive this far out, and put on mascara, and go to the grocery store alone is because I know that they are always there, thinking of us, holding us up.

I hope they can hold us for awhile longer.  This shit is a marathon, and there are ditches and snakes and sand pits and land mines all along the way, and I am getting exhausted.  I have no idea what the finish line looks like.  I'm done envisioning my future.  I'm just trying to keep my eyes open during the day, close them at night, do what my couch-to-5K app tells me to do, and chill out on the wine and chocolate.  If I can at the very least accomplish this weight loss goal, it will be something.  I sent my friend a text today that said I hope that someday I can look back on all of this and know that it was the worst and most challenging experience of my life and be grateful that I somehow survived it.  That's all I want, right now.  To survive this and have better times in the future.  I know Nina's not coming back.  I know that a future baby will not fill the hole she left in my heart.  I know that I will not ever be the same, innocent, fun loving person I used to be.  But if this is the worst of it (and jeezus fucking christ, I hope it is), I just hope that I can say I survived it.  I hope it doesn't kill me.  I don't think it will.

I'm trying.  I'm working hard.  I know I'm still in here somewhere, and that I'm not forever trapped in this body.  Like I said in my last post, I'm alive.  I'm changed, and pretty much broken wide open, but I'm here and I want to live a good life, a FULL life.  I won't let this experience steal any more from me than it already has.  So, gimme all your good vibes, because I really wanna beat this thing.  I really want to heal and live again.  I really just want things to get better.