banker's box

While I was still in the hospital after George died, Leif packed up all the baby stuff and sent it back with my parents at my request.  When I got home it was very surreal to have everything just gone as if he had never even existed.  I regretted sending everything away almost immediately. All that was left were a couple of blankets that I ended up sleeping with for a while.  I thought over time we had recovered all of the boxes that had been sent away but yesterday I was doing some cleaning around the house and pulled out a white banker's box, scrawled with my father's nearly illegible print, "George's stuff and misc."

It was a weird experience, almost two years after his death, to randomly find a box of his "belongings" amongst a pile of other nearly identical boxes containing mundane items from life- wrapping paper, old yearbooks, sandpaper.  Really, as if anything could have ever "belonged" to a child who lived for only twenty-four minutes.  Most of the stuff inside was hand-me-down clothes that I had been collecting for him during the earlier months of my pregnancy when everything still seemed so sure and perfect.   Amidst all the green and blue sleepers and onsies I ended up finding a tiny blue hat that I had bought for his homecoming- I had almost completely forgot about it as I thought it had been lost during those early days of frantic packing and removing.  There is was.  Still tiny.  Still blue.   Still with tags on it and still unworn.  The tag says, "angel dear" and although the term "angel" always makes me squirm in relation to dead babies the irony did not escape me upon seeing it for the first time since before he died.

When things like this happen it is like finding shards of my previous life preserved in golden amber.  I smelled the hat, even though George had never worn it, and I could almost feel like that woman I once was- purely optimistic about life and so very certain about my future.  Oh but that woman hasn't lived in my skin for a long time now.  All the grieving and all the tears these last two years have not been for George alone.  They have been for that woman and that life too.

I removed all the contents of the box and shifted them around to new homes- Clio's closet, the garbage, the pile of stuff to take to the Goodwill.  The hat is in George's box with the rest of his "belongings" that still have sentimental value.  Then that white banker's box got new inhabitants.  I crossed out "George's stuff and misc" and wrote in fat sharpie marker, "Baby clothes 0-3m."

Sometimes I feel like every little trace of George is slowly being removed from life.  It is so hard to keep the memory of a dead baby alive in the shadow of a baby who lives.

Poor George, he deserved so much more than what he was given.