Certainty in a time of turmoil

I do research for a living. I like data. I like gathering, organizing, spreading it out and basking in, all to lull myself into a sense of greater certainty. I don't know that I have the conviction of my youth any longer, so beliefs and conclusions need something to be anchored to. The sea floor is data. We may not be touching it, but we can throw down the anchor when we need to.

And sometimes, when you're floating along, you need to. But then again, sometimes the data is too general and what happens to you, too specific. It's binary, not a probability.

Facing Facebook

It is a topic worthy of some contemplation and I've tried, but I can't seem to understand my aversion to Facebook. On the surface, I recognize that I feel defined by Eva's death and any interactions that don't enable me to deal with that reality head-on feel fraudulent to me. But somehow entering into my status bar "yeah, I am just sitting here... thinking about my dead baby" doesn't feel right. Nor does it feel right to pretend that that is not what I am doing. When I am...

Maybe on another layer, I don't feel successful and being "found" at this point in my life is disappointing to me. I don't know where I am. I don't really know what's next and I feel as though I have wasted so much time.

But I joined. I entered as little information about myself as possible. I just joined so that I could see pictures of B's new baby. Maybe I'll deactivate my account after that. Or maybe I'll face the fear. Hey, maybe I'll learn something along the way. After all, the MoMo site has been very good for me. Maybe another toe is ready to dip.

Sestina for Eva, Two Years On

I wrote this to mark 2 years without Eva. A sestina is hard to write and that felt appropriate.

Sestina for Eva, Two Years On

Two years have passed since you were born with your twin
On every day since I have cradled your heart
A garnet sliver inside your open chest sewn together in blue
Plastic which was your world – isolette, tubing, the smell. I mourn
For all that we came so close to having -- the memory?
A lump of sand I can’t choke down. Naomi, your other half

Thrives but too there is the howling hollow spaces your absence, your half
Leaves unwhole. At 18 weeks we first learned of our twins!
You lived only 21 more and how I wish I could have more memories
Of your beauty, more than just that night before open heart
Surgery (the first), before the car accident, before cardiac arrest that morning
Before your body swelled, called for mercy and released you to the blue

On the good days, relatively, I imagine that you are soaring in the blue
Sky, your bright eyes free of pain and plastic. The other half
Of the time, I think I would take you in any form and mourn
The lost chance to hold you with your brother and your twin
for even one moment as the family of five that is my heart’s
very beat if not the picture in my addled memory.

One part of me is pulled to you in memory
One part to hope, the pieces of my cracked soul in red and blue
The veins and arteries that are tentacles originating from my heart
boring through everything everywhere, splitting into halves
and dividing against themselves creating more twins
multiplying, amplifying all that we’ve celebrated and mourned

Only now can I finally see a morning
Bird soaring and I erect it on my shoulders into a tower in your memory.
In time we will tell Naomi that her twin
Flies so that she will never feel alone as long as the sky is blue
We spin and weave mythologies of you in trying to fill this cup to half
Fullness --for a start-- and grow the left ventricle of your heart

In another universe or dimension perhaps your heart
Is whole and beating. And in that place, I need not mourn
We are complete with both halves
That were never divided. There a book of memories
Is written about two girls with my curls and eyes a kind of blue
Touching as they were for 34 weeks, 6 days, inside one amnion, twins.

I will, to eternity, hold the memory of your heart,
Covered in the blue of an infinite sky in morning
You are half of my world, twin to the earth on which we continue.