Life after loss

David is so little and so big. He is now so many, many things. I am joyful and sorrowful at the thought. It’s not just that David is getting older, which, like all moms, I both want and can’t bear to think about at alternating times in the middle of the same night. It’s that we are also coming up on Clara’s two year–her birthday, or anniversary or angelversary. I honestly still don’t know how to phrase July 13 through July 15, 2016, except to say that they were her days. Her beautiful, powerful days.

As we inch closer to her days, minute by minute and hour by hour, each milestone David passes reminds me of the life she never got to live. Yet, at the same time, each of David’s milestones is a milestone. Each one is a sacred, tender gift. I am acutely aware of them, as if their importance is tattooed on my forehead: “Karlie, enjoy each day, each changing minute with your children. They are not guaranteed. They are a gift from the Lord Almighty.”

So it is that I find the absence and presence of life fill my days. Many days I can bear it. Many days, I can’t. Last night was one. The emotion of it all hit me like fierce rain hitting a newly sprouted flower, which has no choice to but to bend it’s stalk into the ground beneath the weight of the water.

I was changing David’s diaper. We had just ordered a new set in size three. I was trying to attach the sides of the diaper, but his baby rolls were bulging against them, making them difficult to secure. I paused, looking at the fresh, crisp stash of white diapers in his gray bin. Were his size three diapers already too small? He was growing so fast. Yes, so fast compared to Emmarie and Clara. Especially Clara.

I thought about how Clara’s preemie diapers had enveloped her tiny three-pound body. My breath sucked in. How I wanted to see what she looked like in size three diapers. How I wanted to see her squishy baby rolls and toes moving as I fought her little body in the baby changing table diaper dance. I wanted to see her in size three diapers, in fours and fives. I wanted to see her potty

trained like her big sister. I wanted her.

I wanted to hold her, to kiss her and to tell her I loved her one more time.

I succumbed to the pain. I leaned forward on the changing table, my head in my hands as I began to sob. Tears pooled and then rolled off my face and down onto David’s belly. My hair fell around me like curtains resting on his soft skin. My shoulders heaved up and down with the pain. David started to laugh. They were tiny chuckles at first, then deep guttural baby laugh hiccups that grew louder than my crying. His toes and hands reached for my hair and face in excitement, pulling them towards his mouth. The harder I cried, the more he laughed, my hair and tears tickling his soft, chubby belly as he cooed in delight.

I cried even harder. “David, you would have loved your sister; you would have loved her,” I told him, my face still buried in my hands, tears now pooling on him. “Oh, how she would have loved you.”

We stayed there together for awhile, mother and son. Me crying, him laughing. The two of us living, loving and grieving in the best way we know how.

This is life. This is life after loss. It is beautiful and hard. It is breathtaking and centering. It is our path, our winding road, to walk together.