Holly

I've been avoiding - in fact have never planned - a post about the child we lost back in June of 2002.

There are some events in life that you cannot put words to. Your first real love. Your first tragic disappointment. Your first real failure. Your first and other real triumphs (real success is often scarier than failure). Your first favorite song/album/movie/etc. Friends who leave or whom you leave. Your first sex. Your first death that matters. Your first encounter with evil. Your first encounter with true charity. Your first realization that you might be alone, that you might be the only one who feels this way, that you might never be understood. Your first realization that those fears are all false.

Then life really begins. That person really doesn't love you and never will. Your parents are flawed, scared people, just like you. The people you work for one day ask you to put your stuff in a box and leave - it's not personal, but for you it is.

And then you meet that person who does love you, and says s/he always will, and s/he means it. Then you have a baby. Maybe more babies. You experience a love that is not only beyond words, but often beyond your means to cope with it. But it is so wonderful. So wonderful.

Then friends divorce. Pets die. Friends die. Parents die. More jobs are lost to your neighbors, friends, loved ones, yourself.

Then maybe a child dies. You cry so hard that even a seasoned nurse backs into the wall and then runs from the room. You and your spouse dress the baby for the last time. Afterward, you talk about it. You talk about what to tell the child (or children) who expect a new brother or sister. You walk out of the hospital, past the nurses desk (maybe they hug you, maybe they are glad you are leaving), down the elevator out to the car. Home. You close the door of the nursery with the awful knowledge you will take down the crib sometime soon. The funeral is harder than you imagined.

You spend days telling everyone it's ok and that you're ok. This is the truth that is so finely mixed with a lie sometimes you laugh and cry at the same time and only you get it and, at the same time, you fiercely hope that you are the last person to understand that - because you don't ever want someone else to have this happen. You wonder how others have managed it. You find out they really haven't. Time just does what it does. Echoes diminish eventually.

It does keep coming back, though. You will be at the movies, or the mall, or home on the couch, or at a party, or at church, or at a restaurant and the tears will arrive like the rain. (Hemingway would like that.) And it's not just you. It's your spouse. Your other child/children. Children especially get hit with the aftershocks hard - and they don't really expect or understand it. So you have to relive it with them to help them through. Answer some questions again and again. This does not help you, however.

It eventually dawns on you that this is forever. Forever gone. Somehow that's a fresh wound. But that one heals quickly. But the other doesn't. A sunset, a sunrise, or Christmas lights, or a song, or a baby anywhere still brings you up short. Though you may not cry or tear up, you pause and gaze at the sky, or the horizon, or the water, or the baby, or the elderly man or woman simply trying to walk down the street, and ...

And then someone regains your attention. You smile and get back in the game.

And you hope. You hope that hope becomes easier again. And you know that hope is everything. And so is love.