george's birthday

Last year we headed west.  This year we headed east.

We stayed in Idyllwild, which is about 2 1/2 hours from Los Angeles in the San Jacinto mountains.

Our cabin was by a small stream.  Right before 4:00 we made our way up the stream along with George's photos, our journal, and his ashes.  

We had the intent of leaving some of his ashes to find their way in the stream to the ocean but apparently his urn is like Fort Knox and we weren't able to get it open.  It was a bit of a disappointment as it had taken us two years to work up the courage to look at them only to be thwarted by the seemingly simplistic copper box.

Clio enjoyed herself, although I'm not quite sure how she felt about the incredibly huge snow jacket we made her wear.

Two years seems like an eternity and like an instant.  Oh how very much we wish we could have both our babies.

on the two year anniversary of the birth and death of my son

In the beginning my grief was raw, raging and so very, very ugly- a jagged piece of stone with edges so sharp that it would cut, scrape and produce scarlet droplets of blood from whatever tender piece of flesh it came in contact with.  My own skin or that which belonged to someone else, it didn't matter, it was an equal-opportunity slicer and dicer.  It was nasty and it hurt.  But it was my truth and I owned it -or maybe it owned me- because other than my husband it felt like the only real thing in the world.  Everything else was made of paper and string.

It was cold hard disbelief that composed the majority of my early grief.  Disbelief that he was gone.  Disbelief that there wasn't anything I could do to remedy the situation.  Disbelief that something this terrible had happened to me.  After all, I had never before been in a situation that I could not in some way or another wriggle out of, work my way out of, or more commonly, luck out of.  I had lived the first thirty years of my life in relative security that nothing too bad could ever happen to me because, well, I was me.

Time rolled on and as the hideous truth began to settle into the farthest reaches of my mind where denial had its last strongholds, misery and regret were the dominant players.  I replayed events in my mind on a loop, looking for the junctions where my current life crossed with my old one.  It was in a parking garage where I pushed back an appointment with the perinatologist.  It was when, after taking the digoxin and flecainide for the hundredth time, I immediately vomited all over our bedroom floor and starting crying that I couldn't do this anymore.  It was when made the decision to stop treatment after his heart rate returned back to 250.  It was when, as they were prepping me for the emergency c-section, we asked for the neonatologist to come talk to us again about what his chances for survival and a normal life were going to be like should we choose life saving measures.

So many choices.  So many possible different outcomes.

I still wonder about the choices we made during those five weeks but it doesn't consume me the way it used to.  I've mostly resigned myself to the belief that had we made different choices things may have turned out for the better but they also, and most likely, could have turned out for the worse.  There are outcomes far more terrible than holding your baby while he gently dies.  I truly believe that.  Of course now I have a beautiful daughter and it feels unfair to her to wish that I had made different choices.  He died and she is alive.  Try as I may to believe it to be true there is doubtful an arrangement of choices I could have made that would grant me the existence of both my children.

These days though, I mostly grieve alone over his loss and the trauma of what happened.  For the onlooker two years probably seems like an eternity to hold on to so much sadness over a baby who I never even took home with me.  Especially when I have a living, breathing, growing baby at home now.  But I relive the trauma of making those choices and watching George die on an ongoing basis.  It is not something easily forgotten and it isn't something that having a subsequent living child negates.

So my grief is quiet.  I've grown accustomed to shouldering the majority of the work in remembering him.  While there are some in our life who still remember there are many more who either have forgotten or lack the courage to bring him or our experience up in conversation anymore.  The truth is I understand that very few people could possibly miss him the way we do; our parents, my sister, a couple of close friends feel his absence.  I don't hold that against anyone.  I really don't.  There is no anger.  Just loneliness...and the wish that more people could understand that what we went through was more than just losing a baby at 29 weeks.  We live with the trauma of lengthy hospital stays, my body being pounded to a pulp by medication, emergency surgery, making the choice to let our child die and then watching that happen.

I think it only gets lonelier with time.

But it also gets easier.

I feel pretty good most days now.  My life is full of love and wonder and excitement.  Clio brings me more joy than I ever thought could be possible and I am overflowing with gratitude that she is ours and that I get to be her mother.  Everyday she starts to look a little more like her father and it gives me pleasure to see the man I am so very in love with reflected in the face of our daughter.

I am grateful for George even in the midst of all the sadness and longing I carry around with me.  The girl I was before is gone and although there are times when I also fiercely grieve her demise, I like this version of me more.  I am kinder and gentler.  I've gained more empathy for the pain of others.  I am most certainly wiser.  I feel less entitled and more appreciative for the people in my life.

George has taught me to take nothing for granted.  So today, on the two year anniversary of my son's birth and death, I am going to hold close to my family, escape to the mountains, and be thankful for the life that his existence prepared the way for.



*Thank you to everyone who has sent emails remembering George on this day.  This community makes my grief less lonely.  You are all amazing and I am tremendously grateful for each and everyone of you.

birth certificate

Through the thick safety glass the woman with the dark rimmed glasses and white hair that was cut in a short bob stared at me for a good five seconds without saying anything.  I watched her as she watched me with a look of complete incomprehension.  I briefly wondered how long this contest could go on.  Five seconds is not long but it is an eternity when you say something like this,

The woman at window three told me to come here and talk to you about getting my son's birth certificate. He died the same day he was born.  She said you don't have those records but you must because he was a live birth so he has to have a birth certificate.

After the seconds-seeming-hours of staring stopped she knitted her eyebrows together and asked me to repeat his name and birthdate as she scrawled it across a scrap of paper.  Then she proceeded to clack away at her computer until she apparently came to a dead end (ahem, no pun intended) and had to call for her supervisor.

You can't hear much behind safety glass when people make it a point not to speak into the microphone.   So I just watched their mimed conversation from the other side of the counter wondering to myself why this was such a difficult request for them to fulfill.  Surely in a city as large as Los Angeles babies die right after they are born not infrequently and I can't be the only one who has wanted the birth certificate of her dead baby.

I saw one of them shrug and shake her head and then she asked me to have a seat.  They would call me back in a few minutes.

It was at this point that I started to chew on my bottom lip to keep the tears that were hanging around in the corner of my eyes from spilling out onto my cheeks.  I had not been looking forward to this errand, which had been nearly two years in the making, but I did not expect that it would be such an ordeal.  Waiting in line for an hour, explaining to not one but two separate people exactly how long George lived (as if it mattered- one minute or one hour or one day...he was born alive and should have a damn birth certificate), and then initially being told that I'd have to request those records from the state directly.

The woman behind the counter beckoned me with her cotton candy colored nails.

"This all we have," she said, and swung the computer screen so that I could see it.  The word "DECEASED" printed in block letters was all I could see through the semi-clouded with age safety glass.

That's fine.  Give me that.

Two minutes later I was sitting in my car staring at George's birth certificate.  Male, Singleton, Date of Birth 03/31/2010, Time of Birth 1559, Mother's Name Brianna, Father's Name Leif (spelled Leith, WTF?), Date of Death 03/31/2010.  In the box where either Leif or I should have signed the form there was the signature of someone I did not recognize.

No George Ellsworth.  It was blank where his name should have been.

And, of course, things started to make sense, as I sat in my car sobbing.  We were never asked to fill out his birth certificate at the hospital.  Was it a kindness, they thought?  Instead some stranger filled it out as best they could for us.  They never asked his name and that is what makes me the saddest.  To whoever it was who filled out that form for us he was an anonymous dead baby.

They should have asked us if we wanted to fill it out ourselves.  We would have said yes.

around the bend

There is a point during my drive to work where I come around a soft bend in the road to find that the dark asphalt of the freeway has turned into a river of gold and the horizon ahead is ablaze with yellow and white, bursting through the soft clouds in shards of light.  Simultaneously every car, van, and truck slows down, blinded by the light, but also I'd guess gobsmacked by the brilliance of what is filling up their vision.  I imagine the wheels of stress and everyday worry that continuously grind away in all our minds slow and for an instant there is some clarity.

This is where the idea of heaven comes from, I am certain.  Even I, a skeptic and unbeliever to my core, have a brief moment where I can almost see him in the after image the sun burns into my eyes.  Not the baby I held in my arms, or the tow-headed and befreckled boy who occasionally visits me on the banks of my imagination.  I see him.  All of him.  His sum total and the perfection in his human imperfection.  Whatever it is that makes us who we are...that's what I see.  It is a fleeting vision that seems to fill up every atom in my body and one I wish I could follow into the horizon when it recedes back into the soup of life.

The angle of the sun only aligns itself with me at this time of year.  Every other month it is just a freeway, just an ordinary morning sun and just another day in an ordinary life.  But for a few brief weeks during Spring I know he is waiting for me, just up ahead and around the soft bend.

chaos theory

My university calculus professor was a poet.  Actually, he was a mathematician, a poet, and a philosopher all rolled into one grandfatherly type of a man.  I used to stay after class, nearly every session, and talk to him about philosophy and poetry, it was the only liberal arts education this science-oriented student was getting at the time.  In every other aspect of my academics I was eye ball deep in equations and periodic tables but I could talk to him about a haiku or the presence (or absence) of free will for ages.

But this isn't really about Grandfather Jerry.  This is about math and philosophy.  Grandfather Jerry just happened to be the person who I heard from for the first time that mathematics and philosophy are not really all that different from each other.  As odd as it may sound one needs a mind capable of thinking in the abstract to be good with numbers as well as to be good at expounding upon the great questions of life.  Someone who can excel in mathematics can certainly find a home in philosophical studies as well.

One place where math and philosophy intersect is in a concept called Chaos Theory.  The briefest technical explanation of this theory is that an outcome of a system is highly sensitive to its initial conditions.   Or to clarify, a small change in the initial condition of a system can lead to dramatic changes to the system on a long-term, grand scale.  The briefest non-technical explanation of Chaos Theory is what happens at the beginning, no matter how seemingly insignificant, can and will have a large effect on the eventual outcome of a situation.  Most people know Chaos Theory as The Butterfly Effect.  You know, a butterfly flaps its wings in Africa and three weeks later and a continent away a hurricane is born.

In math, Chaos Theory is used to describe situations in which small miscalculations like those inherent in rounding numbers for computation lead to different outcomes.  One person rounds one way and another rounds the other and in complicated mathematical equations they will each get a hugely different outcome.  In philosophy, the theory plays out much in the same way but instead of a numerical figure you are looking at the progression of a life based on a few (or a hundred, or a thousand, or a million...I think you get my point) events that have shaped the course of said life.

Chaos Theory is what makes prediction nearly impossible.   There is no telling how minuscule variables will effect the overall outcome.  Numbers, life, whatever, there is no predicting.

I certainly could never have predicted that I would be here at thirty-two years old, married and the mother of two children; one dead and the other currently napping peacefully in her crib.

Looking back it is easy to see how circumstance or certain choices I've made have shaped my life to where I am now.  For instance, I can trace the origins of my marriage back to a fight that I had with my friend Natalie when we were only nineteen years old, five years before I even met Leif.  A million other little decisions during those five years made it so that when we did finally meet we were both single and, eventually, in the place in our lives where we were able to fall in love.

On a deeper level I can see how a myriad of seemingly innocuous events, decisions, and circumstances ultimately led to George's conception and death.  From the particular time Leif and I had sex; a moment earlier or later and who knows what sperm would have fertilized that egg.  Who knows, we may have conceived a completely different baby who had no health issues at all.  Or the moment I sat in a parking garage rescheduling the ultrasound that would eventually reveal George's rapid heart rate.  That appointment was originally scheduled a week earlier and for some reason I can no longer recall I made the decision to push it back seven days.  Maybe if I had kept that original appointment we would have caught the condition early enough that the medication would have saved his life.  On the other hand, maybe the appointment would have been a day or two before his heart sped up and it would not have been caught at all until I developed the Mirror Syndrome and became seriously ill.  Or simply, one day I could have walked into the OB's office only to have her tell me that our baby's heart had stopped.

But none of those things happened.  Instead Leif and I conceived George and I made the appointment when I did.  It all led to George dying, and, something I've just come to grips with, Clio's existence.  This, folks, has been a hard pill for me to swallow.  We waited to try and conceive the second time around because I could not come to terms with the idea that a subsequent child would only be alive because George was dead.  Originally we had planned on waiting six to nine months after our first child was born to try to conceive the next and so in my mind if we waited that amount of time after George died we would still be sticking to our plan.  I wanted to pretend that in some reality, somewhere, had different choices been made, I would have all my babies with me.  George and Clio.

In reality, though, Clio is currently sleeping peacefully in her crib because George is dead.  Had George lived I would have been ovulating on a different schedule, and even if I was ovulating on the same schedule chances are that Leif and I would not have had sex at the exact same time on the exact same day.  Things would have gone down a different path.  I never even would have known the possibility of her existence.

But that is all history, so to speak.  What happens next, the rest of Clio's story and my own, there is no predicting.  The other children I will have, the people we will meet and interact with, the person Clio will marry, the kids she will have...all of their lives different because one little baby boy's heart beat too fast.

It's all a crazy mind fuck.  It is all just a web of chance interactions. It is all just chaos.

one year six months

I close my eyes and whisper his name so that only I can hear it.  

George.

The wind stirs and it is him, waking up to listen to my voice and touch my face.

I miss you, my love.

Between my fingers the silk of a petal and a subtle fragrance of something clean and sweet; the touch of his face and the scent of his skin.

I'm sorry I couldn't save you.  Can you forgive me?

From a distance comes the sound of a stream over stones and I hear his breathing, rhythmic and soothing.

I hope you felt how much you were loved.

I open my eyes.  

It is just the wind and the flowers and the water.  But for the briefest of moments it was my son and for that instant I was whole again.

...

I whisper his name so that only I can hear it.

George.

the laughing heart

Yesterday Leif shared with me a poem by Charles Bukowski.  Seldom does it happen that I come across a piece of writing that strikes me so deeply to the core that I feel like I must memorize it so as to never forget its message.


The Laughing Heart 


your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.


Over the last two weeks I have felt much of that darkness again, not that it ever entirely left.  Having Clio here has been magical but it has also crystalized for me what exactly was taken away from us when George died and that has been difficult for me to internalize again.  I just miss him so very much and can't really fathom how I will never have him again.


Yet this poem has helped to remind me that I can choose to live out my days in the darkness of circumstance or I can choose to look for the light, wherever it may come from.  The darkness will always be my companion but I choose whether or not to let it consume me.  As Clio grows up I want to share with her the existence of her brother so that from his story and ours she will learn that even in the darkest moments of her life -and surely there will be moments that seem black as night- there will always be at least a small shimmer of light, even when it feels like all of the light in the world has been stolen away.  


And surely there is so much light.
My Leif. 
My Clio.  

My life is my life and I will know it while I have it.

a first anniversary

Last year, when George was born, it was wet and grey.  The world was desaturated, the color drained from the sky and soaked through to the soil where it stayed for a very long time- a still-life in charcoals.  This year, if George's birthday was a painting it would have been a watercolor. All washed out in pale shades of blues and greens with pops of purples and yellows.  There would be ink-outlined objects and figures, giving some definition to the pooling and mottling of the colors.

We didn't anticipate that contrast between this year and last but spring, in all of its vibrancy and softness, has come to this part of the world. After one of the wettest winters on record here, all the wildflowers have begun to stretch toward the sky to gratefully meet the sun.  Small, delicate stems and buds belie their tenacity to grow in even the most peculiar places.  Flowers ornament the empty lots and poke through the cracks in the sidewalk.  Brightly colored graffiti, splashed on the dirty concrete walls, reach down to meet equally brightly colored tiny flowers growing through the asphalt.

When George's birthday finally came upon us we didn't have any big plans. Just a drive out of town, two kites -a goldfish and a phoenix- and a wish for some seclusion.  I wore my new blue dress.  Leif; his favorite chambray shirt.   We found ourselves driving along side vast swathes of yellow and purple wildflowers, spreading over the green hillside opposite the blue of the Pacific Ocean.

After some time we stopped for brunch and then into a children's store with the intent of buying a toy for a one year old that we could donate to a local charitable organization.  We figured that we would continue with the tradition that we started in December so that every holiday or birthday some other child who is the age that George would be gets a new toy to play with they way we wish George could.  In the end we picked a wooden duck push toy that flaps its wings and quacks; something we would have gotten for George.

Before heading out to find a beach we purchased a simple unlined, black moleskin journal that we decided will be George's Birthday Book.  Each year we will write to him and tell the story of what we did to remember the anniversary of the day he was born.  There will be photos of his day and, hopefully, notes from his siblings.  Something that will grow and change as we grow and change.

After driving around for almost an hour, looking for a suitable beach (one without throngs of college students), we took a chance and parked alongside a trail that led into a thicket of wildflowers.  Not sure of where we were going, but knowing the general direction of the beach, we walked along the path for about twenty minutes before coming to the edge of a steep cliff that dropped off above the beach.

There was no easy way to climb down but we eventually found a precarious little path weaving around the jettied rocks and outcroppings.  About two thirds of the way down we realized that it was not the wisest thing for a woman five months pregnant to be trying to traverse but I made it down safe and sound.

A view of the path we came down.  Would not recommend for pregnant women. Especially those in short dresses.

As it turns out, scrambling down a very steep pathway is not for everyone so we ended up nearly completely by ourselves, aside from the occasional ambler from the nearby nude beach (life certainly has a sense of humor, even in the least humorous of times).  Those next couple of hours we spent assembling kites, attempting to fly them with no real success due a pathetic lack of the requisite wind, and generally just feeling the absence of our son.  Together we wrote George's name in the sand and decorated it with shells and as 4:00 rolled around, the time when he was born, we wrote out George's 1st birthday letters in his Birthday Book.

Had to fake this shot as our poor kites never did make it very far off the ground.

Twenty four "official" minutes of life is so brief.  It is a half hour sitcom devoid of commercials.  It is the amount of time it takes me to shower and get ready for bed every night.  It is the amount of time it takes to eat a packed lunch or read an article in a magazine.  George lived for twenty four minutes, although I assume he was gone for some minutes before they actually declared him dead.  So very miniscule in the grand scheme of time.  Not much more than a spark in the dark.

I picked wildflowers for George along the scramble back up the cliff and the walk through the fields.  Purples and blues and yellows, all tiny little blooms.  A bouquet of wild growing flowers made from blossoms that exist for such a short time each year.  They sprout in the cool early weeks of spring only to return back to the soil a piddling time later.  A fitting gift for our own little wildflower.  A gift we will add to the letters and the photographs and the stories every year on his birthday.

To where ever you are, even if you only exist in my dreams, Happy Birthday son.  We love you forever.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Thank you to everyone who remembered George on his birthday and offered kind words of encouragement.  You have touched our hearts.  Family and friends shared with us the ways they remembered him as well and it touched us to know that his existence has not gone forgotten.

our son

We sent this card out to our friends and family to acknowledge his birthday.  

I never thought I could love anyone as much as I love my husband until there was George.  Made from love.  Perfect and beautiful.

We miss him so much.  

seven days

This time last year my baby was still alive and each kick I felt was breaking fragments of my heart away, knowing that any one of them might be the last.

Sometimes I am left stock-still by the shock of it all.  I went into the hospital to give birth knowing that my son would die and I would be going home without him.  Yet I still went!  How did I not run the other way, screw my health, and just take off running in the other direction? How is it even possible that it all happened?  How does anyone go to the hospital very pregnant and leave with an empty belly and no baby?

Now I have an urn and three terrible quality photographs for that horrible experience.

I'm feeling very alone these days.  I love my family and friends and am especially appreciative of the ones who have been reaching out recently to see if I'm ok -I'm not really- but I want someone who knows how I am because they've been where I am.  But there is no one I know in my every day life.

I want to take the next week off of work, close my eyes and try to remember every moment of that last week.  As hard as it was, I still had him with me and I would rather it be hard like it was then, than hard like it is now.

white squares and upcoming events

Some weeks ago we got a piece of mail from the hospital where George was born. In it was a square of white fabric and a letter explaining that it was time for their annual "Forever in our Hearts" ceremony to commemorate all the babies who died during the previous year. The white square, which will be added to a quilt, was for us to decorate in whatever way we want to memorialize George.

Also last month we got a refund check from the hospital. Apparently we were overcharged 150.00 for George's delivery. Hmmph.

Sometimes I forget that George ever even existed to anyone but to me and to Leif. People generally tend not to bring him up anymore in conversation unless we do so first. As we come closer to the one year anniversary of his birth and death, it is increasingly strange to get these kind of reminders that he was indeed real in this world.

Next week brings us to the year mark when last year everything went to shit. We walked into an appointment at the perinatologist as blissful expectant parents and walked out a few hours later nearly catatonic with shock.  

I'm not sure how these next six weeks are going to go for us. The other night we finished his memory square, sent it off to the hospital and I emailed the coordinator to see what we could do at the event to help. We are still trying to figure out what to do for him next month. We are taking the day off from work but beyond that we don't know what feels appropriate.

We never had a memorial service for him and I don't think we will this time either, even though I do eventually want one.  I just don't even know where to start planning such a thing.  Invitations?  Is there food?  We aren't religious so what would we do?  It all seems overwhelming.  Part of me feels guilty that we haven't had one but the other part of me feels like it just isn't us.

What kind of fucked up shit is it that these are the kind of events that some people have to plan for their (dead) child?  It is some real fucked up shit is what it is.

For those of you who read this and know what being here is all about, how did you commemorate your child's life?

.blue.

There used to be a time, in my distant past, that I actually enjoyed doing things of a more creative nature.  Sketching, painting, making collages...things of this sort.  Now most my of creativity, if you can call it that, comes out in the form of refurbishing old furniture or writing on this here blog.

I think I stopped painting because I just didn't find it inspiring anymore.  Or I wasn't inspired by anything enough to lug out my paints and brushes.  After George died I thought this would change but it didn't.  All I could think of painting was big black and blue circles and so I just didn't even bother.  I'm no Kandinsky, after all.  My drawer full of paints and my crate full of paper/canvas has just been sitting unused and collecting dust, quite literally.

But this last week I have been feeling particularly blue and it has got me searching for things to occupy my time.  I still have no job and nothing is looking very promising at the moment.  I could take a job that I do not like but I am not quite at the point yet where that option is looking to be a good one.  I'm close to that point though.  Very close.

What I have been finding is that being unemployed, childless, and bored is a recipe for also being very sad and for feeling pretty crappy about myself.  Oh self-esteem, where art thou?

Today I dragged out my paints and my brushes and spent most of the daylight hours painting.  I chose one of George's ultrasound pictures.  Actually it was the one we got at his 20 week scan and the one we found out that "the baby" was actually George.  That, along with the day I married Leif, was the happiest moment of my life.

As ultrasounds tend to be, this one was a tad bit confusing and I had to take some artistic liberties with one of the limbs (seriously I can't tell if it is a foot or an arm so I just made it into an arm).  I will probably end up fixing some stuff about it later but for now it is what it is.

I can't say that I am completely happy with the way it turned out but it does look like my boy, especially his face.  I can see his dad in that face.

I'm kind of nervous about putting this up here but...here goes anyway...

George Ellsworth.  Acrylic.  

.timelines.

Yesterday was six months since George died.  It won't be long before he has been dead longer than he was alive.  Once we pass the 29th week from his birth/death date I will be living in the grief about his death for longer than I was ever living in the joy about his life.

How unforgiving time is.  No matter how much I want to dig in my heals and refuse to be dragged along with it, I can't.  No amount of tears or pleading slows down the constant march forward and so I am left craning my neck backward in the hopes of catching a glimpse of what I once had.

The farther away into the present time drags me the more obscure my past becomes and the more events begin to coalesce.

This...

That time I got pregnant and when we found out he was a boy and when we decided on the name George Ellsworth after our fathers and the first time I felt him move and when we found out he was sick and when we were in the hospital and when I took all that medication and the moment we really realized that we were beyond saving him and when I got really sick and when we had to make the choice to not send him to the nicu and when we held him and he was live and when he died and when we realized he was never coming back.

Inevitably will become something more like this...

That time in my life I had a son named George and he died.

I want his life to occupy more of my timeline.  Instead as time stretches out to the right, the space his life occupies on that line shrinks and the space his death occupies expands.  

It is all wrong.

His death should have never occupied any space on my timeline at all.

.five months.

Five months.

It seems  like forever.  

People go through their days like they do every other day.  To most everyone else this particular day is like yesterday and it is like tomorrow.  That is the way this life works.  Our burdens are our own to carry.  To expect anything more is naive and unfair.  

In an hour it will have been five months since he was born.  In less than an hour and a half it will be five months since he was last alive.  

I wish there was more for him than this. 

I want him back.  With every part of who I am I want something that I can never have.  I wish I believed in something more than this life.

Time is hurtful.  

And the question keeps playing on repeat.  

How did this happen?

.a hard day.

Sometimes I can feel it starting to creep in and sometimes it just comes out of nowhere.  It sweeps down, knocks the air out of my lungs and I am right back where I was on March 31st. 

Today I wasn't expecting to feel so horrible. 

This weekend my mom gave me the sweater that she was making for him around the time that he was born and died.  It is tiny and adorable and he'll never get to wear it.

Yesterday I saw Gretchen, who I have known since I was eleven but haven't seen in over two years.  Her family is absolutely lovely.  She made George the most beautiful quilt.  On it is embroidered an image of a little stuffie fox that was going to go into his nursery.  It's perfect. 

This afternoon I am having lunch with a friend who I haven't seen in months.  The last time I saw her I was a slobbering mess.  The only difference between me all those weeks ago and the current me is that I can put on a smiling face and pretend that I am not as sad as I really am.

I just want to wait for this day to pass into the next while laying in bed with the covers pulled over my head. 

My heart hurts.

Life is unfair.

I want my son back.

.neon in fog.

Memories are tricky beasts.  Some memories can hit you with the strength of a hammer yet when you try to hold on to others they fall through your fingers like water. Why is it that we so easily remember some things and not others?  The things I want to remember so quickly seem to fall into the crevices of forgetfulness, while the ones I wish were a little less vivid seem to glow in my mind like neon lights.

Those neon lights are surrounded in fog and they flash in reds and blues:

"I'm sorry we are meeting under these circumstances.  I have bad news...."
"He's probably had the SVT for at least a week..."
"This happens so rarely, I see maybe one or two cases like this a year..."
"Normally we would send you straight to the hospital but I've spoken to the cardiologist on the phone and we both feel that at this point another night probably won't change the outcome...."
"Dr. Brown said that your blood work came back from last night and it is worse than it was before.  She says we need to go in for the c-section this afternoon..."

Other memories are shrouded in fog and I can hardly remember the first six months of the pregnancy anymore. 

Those memories, when I can pull them out of the fog, come in discreet packets.

The other day Leif and I went for a walk around the reservoir and I remembered that we used to walk that same path at least once a week before we got the news that sent us over the proverbial falls in only a barrel. We went partially to baby-watch...to observe what type of strollers people were using.  We went partially to imagine ourselves there with our own son.  Many times we would swing by on our way home and get a couple of scoops of our favorite gelato because I was, after all, still having trouble putting on weight during the pregnancy. 

Up until that terrible day Leif had taken a daily picture of me in the same outfit and in the position with the intent of doing a time lapse video after George was born.  I used to get so frustrated with those pictures.  Leif was so excited about the project and sometimes I would make such a fuss about having to change into that same outfit every night.  I was foolish and thoughtless.  Now there are loads of pictures of me hidden somewhere on his hard drive.  If ever he were to put them together I would want him to name it "The Girl Who Stayed Pregnant Forever."  Because really, in those pictures time froze when I was 24 weeks pregnant.  We don't have a single photograph of me after we got George's diagnosis.

I still have an unfinished blog post about my 23rd week of pregnancy.  It rambles on about feeling his movements and how I was increasingly getting uncomfortable.  I was working on it when we left the house to go to that first Perinatologist's appointment.  We were just going to get better views of his kidneys and the flow through the cord.  I wasn't concerned.  Besides bad things didn't happen to me.  Bad things didn't happen to Leif.  Now I occasionally look back at that unfinished post and wonder if I should publish it one day.  Right now it is just a reminder, a preserved memory, that life took such a dramatic turn later that day that the person who wrote that post doesn't exist anymore.  Parts of her are still here but I am not that naive young mother-to-be anymore.

So yes, if I try hard enough I can remember, vaguely, that part of my pregnancy when we were happy and all was right in the world. 

Leif first felt him move while we were in the hospital.  I want to remember that moment forever.  Somewhere I think we still have video of the ultrasound when we found out he was a boy.  Even without the video I remember our excitement on that day.  I also recall discussing with my sister the invitations and date for the baby shower.  I have one of the invitations, which were never sent out, saved in a drawer.  I think I will always keep that around.  And the blankets our mothers made for him will always be reminders of how much he was loved.

I want to remember more of those things and hopefully it will cut some of the bitterness still left in my mouth.  I want to remember more laughter and less tears.  More visits with friends and less visits with doctors.  More prenatal vitamins and less cardiac medications.  More morning sickness and less digoxin toxicity. 

More joy.  Less grief. 

Memories are tricky beasts.  Sometimes the only way to hold on to them is to forcibly pin them down with words.  Like butterfly specimens underneath dusty glass.  I guess that is why I chose to do this. Because even when I forget, and there will come a time as my wounds slowly heal that I will begin to forget and a time when more memories will start to blend in with the fog, there is proof that once upon a time I remembered everything.

.just another day.

Two weeks ago today George's due date came and went with not much more than regretful thoughts of what should have been and imagined scenarios of how wonderful things could have been.  There was no fanfare, no congratulatory flowers or nervous excitement.  There was no car seat or stack of diapers ready to be used.

There was no baby.

Instead there were hushed voice mail messages, consolatory texts, and emails heavy with sadness from family and friends.  None of which I knew how to respond to except to thank them for remembering him.  Because memory is the only thing left for him now.

And of course there were tears.  I never realized how many varieties of tears actually exist in the world until now.  Frustrated tears, sorrowful tears, angry tears, exhausted tears, and guilty tears.  So, so many guilty tears for so, so many different reasons.

I never wrote much about our attempted island escape that day because I was never really sure of what to write that I had not already written in one way or another.  But having that day come and go was like losing him all over again.  As Leif described it, that day was the point in time where the shadow life started and we, here in this life, were still left with the reality of what happened. 

We could not fix his heart.  We could not save his life. 

...if only we had caught the tachycardia a week earlier...
                                        and
...if only he had been a few weeks older when it started...

We could not manipulate time.

Modern medicine failed, despite everyone's best efforts.

And so George has two birthdays.

I find myself slowly resolving into acceptance of the things that I could not have changed and fixating on things that I had the power to change but didn't.  I should have brought the baby blankets my mom and Leif's mom made for him to his delivery.  I should have made sure they gave us the cap he wore.  I should have told the Anesthesiologists to stop being so fucking normal and fine with what was going on while I was on the table waiting to say hello and goodbye to our baby.  I should have taken more photographs. 

I should have spent more time with him.
I should have spent more time with him.
I should have spent more time with him. 

Everyday I still miss him and everyday I still wish for him back.  Yet these last few days have been good ones, I swear.  I can say his name without my eyes brimming with tears or my voice trembling with sadness.  I can laugh and it is not just pretense.  I can make jokes and not feel like I am betraying my son's memory by feeling happy.  I can look at the future and not see a solid black wall of nothingness.

God, had I known therapy would be this awesome I would have started long ago, when I didn't even need it.

I know these last few days are probably just a brief break but this feeling of some kind of normalcy is welcome.  Soon enough I am sure that I will find myself struggling with the same feelings of sorrow and longing that I have become accustomed to.  They will start to creep in around the edges before long but I know that this is just the nature of the beast called Grief.

.of bones and fossils.

I don't live too far away from an area of Los Angeles that was named for the tar and oil that has been seeping up from the earth there for nearly forty thousand years.  During these forty thousand years or so animals have been getting stuck in the tar and dying, leading to a massive amount of fossilized remains for nerdy scientists to play with and piece together like some mighty economy sized box of Tinkertoys.

Works out well for us since we got to go to the museum recently, which is comprised of all the bits and pieces of animal remains that they've found in the tar pits.  We oohed and aahed over how different life was ten...twenty...thirty thousand years or ago.  Didn't really work out as well for all the animals that got stuck in the tar though, as demonstrated by the life-sized installation outside the museum that depicts an adult and juvenile mammoth watching helplessly from the shore as another adult mammoth slowly sinks into the dark muck.  Very uplifting, that installation.

I can admit that sometimes I feel not unlike that mammoth stuck in the tar.  It was probably wondering, right after it first stepped into the tar and realized that it was in serious trouble, what the hell just happened and how did it get there when just moments before it was on perfectly solid ground.  I keep thinking the same questions.  How did we get to this place?  It feels like just moments ago everything was going along quite smoothly and suddenly WHAM! we're stuck in the fucking tar pits.

It makes me wonder if years from now we will be in our own museum that we have named George and after roaming the halls for the hundredth or millionth time we will stumble upon the fossilized remains of the people who we were before we got stuck and the ones who we had to sacrifice to slog our way out again. We will hold hands and ask each other, "I wonder what they liked to do for fun or how they dressed?" and "Do you think they loved each other as much as we love each other now?"

"They probably had no idea what was about to happen."

"How very sad for them,"  We will say.

There may even be a placard with a description that reads: "They thought they were invincible."