A Cancer

I know now that Eva's death will be my slow metastasizing cancer. It will be my undoing. What started on April 4th and what will finally end when I do. That's what this pain feels like. That's what I fear I am becoming. I walk through every day deadened by this pain. I think thoughts that eventually lead me back to the chair I sat in while holding Eva's dead body. I marvel at the person who went through 29 days in a blind rush and panic from one child to the next, hoping to give each one his or her due. Eva will never fucking get her due. I should have been with her every moment she was alive. Would it have many any difference in the duration of her life? I wish I could just understand why she died.

I want to tear my eyes out, but mainly I want to carve holes into my left arm for Eva. For the side of my body she lived in. Should I have waited to deliver? Why did she arrest on the operating table? Did someone's negligence cause her death? If they'd given her anticoagulants on April 3rd, would she be alive today?

At so many moments her course could have changed. At so many moments she clung to life by a thread. So we shouldn't have been surprised when she died. But we were.

I'm disgusted with myself for writing this pity party like a goddamn teenager.

On Pain and Suffering

In the hospital, when I was in pain, a nurse would always ask me to quantify my pain on a scale of 1-to-10. I found that to be a very weird and confusing exercise. I had to call up all my experience with pain and what I could only imagine the extremes of physical pain might be, and then chart myself along that continuum somehow. Putting a number to it seemed to give the pain a definite value, but that value was meaningless in the face of my own subjectivity, inexperience and the complete inadequacy of the right side of my brain.

My friend sent me an email in which she claimed (in so many words) that what she's going through pales to my suffering. That statement, albeit well-meaning, is utterly futile. I can't a) know the boundaries of suffering in my own life, much less understand its possibilities in an empirical sense, b) quantify this payload of pain to any other in my own life, much less to any in the life of another human being. So how much pain am I in on a scale of 1-to-10? Go f**k yourself.

The interminable march of days ahead

When Eva first died, I thought I could handle the grief. The initial pain was searing, a great shock, but I felt that I could make room for the weight of my grief. It could find a space in which to settle in. But I had people around me then. They knew I was grieving and expected and nurtured my grief. It's been 3 months and 10 days. It's harder now in some ways. I feel as though my window to grieve is closing. The time to "move on" has come. I have nowhere to move on to without this beautiful baby of mine who will never grow.

July Update

The girl has made great progress in physical strength in the past few days. She's doing great with trunk strength, managing to hold her self at nearly a 90 degree angle. She's even started to roll over, from stomach to back. She really doesn't like tummy time I guess! I've come to realize, though, that we will likely face some challenges with her. I think she's going to be very attached to me and it won't be easy to start her in daycare, which we're currently looking to do at about 10 months (or January, if all pans out).

The boy also continues to amaze, but on the cognitive front. The other day, he told me he wanted to move because our garage is too messy.
Today at the park, a parent said he was taking his son to get I-C-E-C-R-E-A-M. The boy immediately responded, "Why is Willy going to get ice cream?" Our tools are quickly being diminished...