Seven Months

The enormity of what happened takes my breath away. Literally. Sometimes I cannot breathe, thinking about the daughter that was, the baby so full of life, the shy young girl terrified to speak up in class, the older girl with such a forceful, even destructive, lust for living; and then the frightened girl in a hospital bed, sick beyond relief from drugs and radiation, and later the passive, paralyzed, bald girl who seemed to have made peace with this turn in her life. Those months were good ones, healing for me, and I hope for her, after years of difficulty. But after them came the weeks of rapid decline, the confused girl, childlike, worn out, increasingly unable to understand or, eventually, make herself understood, who dribbled when she drank and didn't know when she had to pee. Now I see my youngest child making the strides forward that every baby makes, and I think of my firstborn, who made those same strides forward sixteen years ago, and then in reverse sixteen years later.

I suppose it's normal, seven months after her death, to still feel the wound so deeply. This kind of thing is unnatural, is not supposed to happen; just the thought of a sixteen year old--any sixteen year old--dying causes us all to shake our heads in sorrow. And this was my child. Yet when she died it was also welcome. We knew it was coming, and her year of struggle, extreme suffering, and then heart-wrenching decline made her death a relief. Though I knew to be prepared for the feelings I'm having, I thought with the optimistic naïvete of the uninitiated that I'd dealt with her death already, that knowing it was coming and living through her illness so intimately had prepared me. That the worst of the blow had already been processed.

But it stays with me, its power to make me burst into tears undiminished. It hits me when I hear certain songs, see certain photographs, watch Tilo reach baby milestones. Sometimes it hits me without any trigger at all. It feels like it felt when, running to jump my grandmother's ditch, I fell flat, hard, and the wind was knocked completely out of me.

I hope the pain will fade as the years pass, but then I'm terrified that that means I won't remember the details anymore.

Remembrance

Meghan's tulips, blooming by the front door.