Six weeks...

I've been wandering about for the past few weeks feeling incredibly lonely. It is very lonely being a mom who has lost her child, because you are missing the child that was inside you, and you are missing the person that you used to be and you are missing the connection you used to feel with your life and your family and your friends and just with everything. You feel really lost. I realized the other day that it lonely and sad feel pretty much the same. It's hard to explain, but part of what I had been characterizing as lonely was probably just that I was feeling sad. But I didn't recognize sad, because I am rarely sad, so I was just calling it "lonely", which was an emotion that I understood better, but which wasn't entirely accurate.

I am sad because my daughter died six weeks ago. Six weeks ago I was sitting in a hospital bed, watching tv and crying and just wondering why the world had to be so very unfair and take my daughter away from me and my husband and my son. I am sad because in all of the things I imagined could go wrong in my pregnancy, that the thing I never considered was that she could have a cord accident and die. I thought about all the bad medical things that could happen and what we could do about them, but I never thought that what would happen would be something that I couldn't fix, and that would rob her of even any chance. And now, going forward, it is going to be all that I think of when I get the chance to be pregnant again. How wrong is it that my list of stuff that could go wrong is now so much longer than any list I could have of things that go right? How sad is it that there is now no longer any time that I will be able to say "whew," and finally be excited and happy to be pregnant? I'd have to be lobotomized in order to relax ever again.

Cord losses, as well as other 'unexplained' pregnancy losses seem to be particularly cruel. I will never know "for sure" that Shannon died from a cord accident. I just won't. There is no test, no way to measure what happened to her. All I know is that she was there, and then she was gone, and I am lost and lonely and sad without her. Six weeks ago, a lot more than just my daughter died, a big part of me did too. I miss and love my little girl very much.