Lucky number 7

It's been seven months.

I'm still alive.

I marvel at that somewhat. There are still moments when I wish what I wished at the beginning, that the world would simply stop and acknowledge our loss. It seemed no less than Gabriel's due, no less than our due for such emptiness and pain in our lives.

I've re-read Elizabeth McCracken's book and she talks so eloquently about how one of the worst aspects is the lack of change in their (in our) lives. With most deaths, there is an aching void that used to be the person who died. There is a gap, and a painful alteration of our lives that we recognize as permanent. You'll never share lame stories from your childhood with your sibling again, you'll never smell that unique smell of lilacs and fresh bread that you knew was your grandmother, you'll never be able to do something with that person again.

In baby-loss, there is a void, and yet life continues on much as it was before, a mockery of your life before. You were making room for this new life, you had geared your anticipation to the changes of the new life, and suddenly there is no new life. You are the same as you were, and while there is a void and a gap, it's invisible and you simply live the parody of normalcy and rail against the cruel fates that you recognize this life and this life is not as it should have been.

I think that is one of the reasons that ttc again is so hard. It's yet another way in which this life is so alien. And for all the alien feeling, it's a sci-fi movie, because it's so perfectly rendered in its previous incarnation. There were two, there are two still.

The grief is always there, the grief and the guilt and the regrets and the pain. They wane, thankfully - for who could bear up under them in full force and not go as insane as Ophelia? I'm not sure whether the intensity really fades with that cure-all of Time, or whether we simply get accustomed to it and so it no longer feels as strongly as it did.

The longing is ever present. I wonder if there is a moment in which I do not miss my son. It's such a normal sensation that I am inclined to think I'd notice the feeling by its absence if such a moment ever presented itself.

And for all of that, we carry on and we are reasonably happy. Would that it were otherwise, but as it isn't, I guess we're becoming accomplished at making the best of what we have. Would that this picture of two would become three again, but there my hope falters. For all that I hope this cycle works, I have become so accustomed to this picture, I have a difficult time seeing anything different. I think if I did so once upon a time, it must have been a dream.