my new reality

So, I had a really good day with my husband on Wednesday. We went out to a nearby town (Mishima) that we’ve always meant to visit but never had the chance to do so while I was pregnant. We've been through Mishima dozens of times before – it’s the largest train station in our area. We changed trains there to get to our hospital, and it’s also a shinkansen (bullet train) station, so we always came through here on our way to Tokyo. We’ve always wanted to be able to linger but never could. Today, we did. We visited Rakujyuen, a big and extremely beautiful park that had imperial connections during and after the Meiji Restoration. In addition to the extensive gardens, they have a small collection of animals and a petting zoo, which Geordie enjoyed. He’s a very hands-on type of guy.

Then, we walked to Mishima Taisha (Mishima Big Shrine), which we knew was large but was much larger than expected. It was getting dark by that time, so there weren’t many people around, but it was obvious that the shrine was preparing for an upcoming celebration – Shichi-Go-San. This means “Seven-Five-Three,” and it’s a traditional festival day that celebrates the growth and maturation of children; specifically, boys aged three or five and girls aged three or seven (hence the name of the festival). The children are dressed up in colorful kimono and taken to their local shrines to be blessed and for families to pray for their continued health and growth. Shichi-Go-San is held on November 15th, but sometimes children visit earlier than that, for various reasons. By the time we got there, it was really too late for anyone to be there for any celebrations, which was good. It’s hard for both of us to be around young children now. It hurt a little bit thinking about how I would’ve liked to bring Lauren to a shrine in a few years for her Shichi-Go-San visit. I used to like to think of how pretty she would look in a kimono, how proud we would be of her.

And I’m so angry now! It was hard to be angry in such a peaceful, beautiful place like Mishima Taisha, but I feel it now. Why did this happen to her - to us? Why is it that we have to let go of our dreams for the future? Why are we the ones who have to mourn our daughter, while others can continue to dream and smile and laugh and LIVE?

In these quiet moments, I find myself taking all these hopes and dreams I had for Lauren and turning them over, and I can almost feel them happening. She's so real to me that I can see her doing all these things that I wanted her to do, I can hear her laughter – I may never have heard her voice, but I can hear it and know that it's her. I can see her in my mind, standing there before the shrine, dressed like a flower, and she looks back at us because she's run ahead – she's just like her father, curious and impatient and needing just to GO and run – and she's so lovely in the sunlight, a free and wild creature, unruly dark curls bouncing around her face, and she smiles like a supernova. And her father hands me the camera, and she squeals as he chases her and catches her up in his arms and swings her around, and I am filled with so much love for them because they're mine and I belong to them. THIS is how things are supposed to be, THIS is what should be the reality, and the cold, gray darkness I'm living now is just a nightmare that will pass into the night.

Except this nightmare never will pass; it is my world now. It is my every waking moment, the pain of which is so great that I often think it shall destroy me. Shatter me into pieces. Again. And again. Every day, I try to put myself together again. Some days I’m more successful than others. Some days, I fool myself into thinking I’m alright again. But the illusion never holds up. I look into the mirror of myself, and I see there the happy, laughing mother and her bright-eyed daughter, and I know it should be me and Lauren.

But it's not. And the anger at how unfair it all is flows out of me, and all it leaves is emptiness. The anger doesn't help; nothing can help. I will always have an empty place inside me, an empty place in my life where Lauren should be but isn't.

what I see when I close my eyes

I’ve been reading a lot of pregnancy and baby loss blogs lately, and it’s both heartbreaking and inspiring to read the stories of families who have lost their precious little ones. Hardest of all, though, is seeing the images of their children. Over and over again, at nearly every blog I visit, there are the pictures of infants loved and lost, dressed in clothes that were supposed to be their going-home outfits and cuddled by their mourning families.

I used to think this was on the morbid side of things, but that was before I knew better. That was before I had a reason to think about why those pictures would be so important to a family and why one might come to regret not having them done.

Because my wish right now – besides actually having my daughter with me, which will always be my greatest wish that will never come true - is to have a picture of her. Immediately after the delivery, I did not have the presence of mind to think about asking for pictures. I’m not even sure if that’s something Japanese hospitals do or even allow. It wasn’t until later that night, when I closed my eyes to go to sleep and all I could see was Lauren, that I realized that was the only way I was ever going to see her. I would not be able to see her again, not as she was when she was born, not as she was when she was new and whole and belonging to us, to Geordie and me.

Worse still, I will never have anything tangible to hold and cherish, nothing to remind me of her face. I will never have anything to show to her grandparents; they will never know how beautiful and peaceful she looked. They will never see the slight curl of dark and still damp hair over her little ear, the soft patch of eyebrows over her closed eyes, or the gentle roundness of her cheeks. I will have nothing to show people when I tell them about Lauren; I will have only my memory, and that’s not something I can just hand over to people to help them see that she was real and beautiful.

Greatest of all is the fear that I will forget what she looked like, the curve of her chin and her little button nose. It was so brief, that moment with her – how can I make those few minutes stretch into a lifetime? As much as it hurts to see her sweet, sleeping face in my mind, it would be worse still to forget her. Right now, I can close my eyes and see her, but how long will that last? How long will it be before the image starts to fade and all I can do is guess at what I once saw every time I closed my eyes? I don’t want an idealized image of Lauren – I want her. I want to remember the small patches of red on her forehead and chin where she had lost skin during the delivery. I want to remember her tiny ears flattened down, her nearly lipless mouth opened in a perpetual yawn. She was beautiful to me as she was; she would have been beautiful to me no matter what she looked like.

But physical representation of Lauren has been lost to me now, and all I can do is cling to the memory I have of her. I cannot go back and tell myself that pictures are necessary, a comfort rather than a cruel reminder; I wasn’t ready to know that then. I wasn’t ready to think about it then. And now it's too late.

Too late to help her, too late to save her, too late to take pictures of her, too late to hold her, too late to kiss her goodbye. It will always be too late.