Milestones

It's been a few months of milestones: the anniversary of Chiara's death/birth, my birthday, our anniversary, the second year we participated in the walk for remembrance and the babyloss service at our hospital, Halloween, all these days to mark the passing of a year without our baby girl. All these days to note how we are different from who we were last year. I am less raw. I do not cry constantly. I now have 2 living children. Life is much better than it was this time last year. We made it through a terrible, terrible year and we welcomed our new son and I am so grateful. And still there is sadness.

I am grappling with the fact that my days are filled great joy and great sorrow. My brain seems to want to believe that the joy will outweigh the sadness, outcompete it, and then the sadness will go away. This is not happening. The joy grows, the sadness lingers, it does not diminish in relation to the joy. There is a lot of both in my day to day. I find this frustrating, and I keep bumping up against it, having to learn the lesson over again.

I keep remembering a line from a Pablo Neruda poem, "love is so short, forgetting is so long." This is clearly about romantic love, but it still applies. Except it was not the love that was so short, but our time together. The love persists, but the forgetting is so long. And I don't want to forget, really. I want to recall the joy I felt when we found out she was coming, when we learned she was a girl, when we watched her move inside me, when her big brother felt her in my tummy, when we all thought she would join us. All of that beauty was so short, and is overshadowed by her loss. Her baby brother is now here, he made it through where she did not. He grows as she did not have the chance to, we get to love him in person. I am so grateful, but I am still so sad.