12. Sometimes I write articles.

Ones that seem ineffective; that don’t quite capture what I want to say, probably because I have no idea what that is. As I wrote in my previous post, I don’t understand anything, and won’t, ever. That’s how it feels these days.

Here’s an article I wrote for Live Mom about our daughter Pearl, and perhaps even more, about August. As usual, I worked on it for weeks, refining it slowly, and felt good about it…until the day it was published, at which point I suddenly figured out a bunch of things I wish I’d added, deleted, or worded differently. Oh, well. I guess that’s the thing about writing; it’s never really done; there’s sort of no such thing. A written piece is a strangely living organism; as long as the writer is willing to keep reworking it, the piece stays dynamic, always ready to shift with each new day’s shifting perspective.

August, you were born exactly two years ago. (Since you were born at 1:24 AM on 1/12/10, I’m setting this post to publish at 1:24 AM on 1/12/12.) I miss you and love you so hard, every day. I look at your picture by my bed every night, and wish you were here. I wish Pearl could get to know her brother. I wish our missing family member could be with us once again. I still remember exactly how it felt to hold you, all nine pounds of you. You were warm and heavy and big, and so beloved. I hope you knew exactly how much.

11. Sometimes I reflect on how much parenthood hurts.

So far, for me, parenthood is much, much harder than I ever expected. It hurts a whole lot more — infinitely more. It’s hard and sharp and brilliantly beautiful, like looking straight at the sun through a diamond prism. The hardest thing in the world; the most compellingly gorgeous; so bright and dazzling you can’t look away, but the longer you look, the more painful it becomes, the more you cry, and the more permanent damage you sustain.

Sometimes I think about the saying, “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” I’ve thought about that idea so many times over the past two years. August’s death didn’t kill me, but it most certainly weakened me. Applying the above metaphor, I guess my soul is the part of me that has sustained permanent damage. Or maybe not my soul, exactly, but my emotional self: the part of me that feels broken due to this one event — his death. Or maybe my soul and my emotional being are one and the same, and both have been changed forever; both are less whole than they once were.

Since August died I have wrestled with questions about meaning and meaninglessness — “What the fuck is the point?” kinds of questions. Losing him is teaching me such a worthwhile lesson about myself: that I am not special. That I am just one among many in this world, this life. Believing I was lucky or untouchable was the most misleading of illusions, and one based in the simple fact that until August died, nothing ever happened to challenge that belief.

That is a great thing to learn. We are all the same. Losing August is also teaching me about pain, suffering and compassion: I have such a much greater capacity now for all three. This enables me to connect more readily and genuinely with others in pain.

But I don’t know if that helps them. They are still in pain, even if I’m feeling it exquisitely with them. How does that help? Besides, when you’re in pain, you aren’t really aware of others sharing it with you. You just hurt. And hurt, and hurt. At least for me, it created a huge self-absorption that lifted only when the pain stopped being quite so constant. I think this may be common: You only start to notice other people again, and feel grateful that they were there the whole time, helping you carry that impossibly heavy load, once your pain has begun to lift.

Also: Two years ago! August was born and died two whole, long years ago. Soon it will be three, and five, and ten. Pearl, August’s sister, will be a toddler and a child and a preteen, a young woman, an adult. As we move further and further from August’s existence in time, will his absence hurt less? Will the trauma of his birth recede? Will his life turn out to have more meaning, or less, or both? Will this mountain of shit seem less like it happened yesterday? Will it become more abstract? Will it start to seem like just an event — a particularly sad one, but just one amongst the jumble of all the events of our lives?

I think I am glad for the lessons… I’m not sure. All in all, since becoming a mom two years ago, I just feel sadder and more confused. Everything is even more of a contradiction than ever before. I feel more fucked, but also luckier, because August died. Eternally devastated, and yet richer: Had he never been here at all, I would be like a paper-cutout version of myself. Now the truth of life, the wisdom of the universe, the complexity of being human, seem somewhat closer, and yet entirely out of reach. I will never understand. Anything. Ever.

Speaking of things I will never understand: My friend Esme died on January 1 this year. I keep thinking of her mother — how she must be feeling the screaming shock, the bright, mad, ripping pain that I felt when August died. Right now, she is inside that insane fun house that I was inside once. I hold her in my heart with so much love and commiseration. Most likely, she will find her way out of that fun house, but right now I imagine that all she can see is her own, warped reflection, stretched and twisted in countless mirrors, and the Exit sign nowhere to be found.

One of the biggest fears you have when your child dies is that after a while, no one will remember anymore, and your child will no longer matter. One thing that comforts me about my friend Esme is that I do not think that’s possible with her. She was the brightest light, the kindest, most encouraging and enthusiastic person I think I’ve ever known. She had hundreds of friends; maybe thousands. She made each of us feel like her favorite person. There’s no way we could forget her. I hope her mother knows.

10. Sometimes I thought I didn’t count as a real mother.

I wrestled with this question a lot after August was born and died: Am I a real mother? Do I count in the “mommy club”?

I tried to reason through it logically: I had had a child. Physically, by definition, that made me a mother. But I didn’t have that child anymore. I never got to raise him. In my mind, a mother was someone who had a child in her care, someone in charge of a little person’s life and wellbeing. That wasn’t me. So I wasn’t a mother.

The phrase “childless mother” ran through my mind a lot. Often in the cold months after August’s death, I would go running, and as I ran, alone, the chill air rushing in, out, in, out of my lungs, my arms pumping, my feet rhythmically hitting the sidewalk, I would think about those words. Childless mother. I would turn them over and over in my mind and frown to hold back tears as the air chilled my eyes, making them water anyway.

When other women, friends and coworkers, talked about their pregnancies, I would weigh in, adding my own experiences and memories — but I would cringe inwardly as I spoke. I felt as if I was faking something, being too desperate — “Me too, I was pregnant too…!” It was such a profoundly uncomfortable space to occupy: having experienced and enjoyed a whole, entire pregnancy, but having no baby to show for it. Did I get to take part in the conversation? Was I in the club? Did I count as a mom?

Another question I wrestled with: Was August really born? I remember saying something to my sister about that once, and she looked at me as if I were nuts. But I couldn’t figure it out. Obviously, August had come out of me, into the world; but he wasn’t alive. I associated being born with starting life. To me, his life never started. Had it? After all, he hadn’t qualified for a birth certificate (something that bothered me deeply for a long, long time).

But he had qualified for a death certificate. Sometime later, a friend pointed out, “If something can die, then it was alive.” That comforted me, and I added it to my logical arsenal — my case for August having been alive, having been here, having mattered.

And by that definition, hadn’t his life, in fact, begun? It started inside me, and ended inside me, just before I pushed him out.

9. Sometimes it is still so huge and deep.

Times like now. A warm, sunny, lovely Friday morning in later October. I have been feeling so pleased all morning as I go around the house, doing laundry and saying silly things to the dogs, and I’m puffed up with that pleasure, the headiness of it, since it is so hard-won: Always, lurking in the back of my mind, there is the consciousness of the pain, such pain, and the loss that my husband and family and I have endured these past 21 months and nine days since August died.

I guess that’s a measure of how far I’ve come in this process of grief, or more accurately, how far I still have to go: A really, really good morning still makes me goofy and proud of myself, because really, really good moods, good moments, still aren’t the norm.

Even though we have a lot to feel really, really good about now. Such as this little girl who is sleeping in my lap, her loosely clenched fist pressed against her cheek in the contemplative, “Hmm…” pose she often adopts in sleep. She has a little faux-hawk, a tuft of hair right on top of her head that is surrounded by baldness. I call the tuft her eternal flame since it is reddish and wild and ridiculous and jaunty and wavy, and will not lie flat. (Not that I want it to, at all. I don’t.)

She is my daughter, my second child. She is seven weeks and three days old. She was born right here at home, on the floor between our bed and the bathroom door, in an explosion of energy and noise (from me, screaming and hyperventilating as I pushed her out) and light (from the row of bulbs above the bathroom mirror, shining down on us, illuminating the moment of this miraculous girl’s miraculous entry into this miraculous, terrible, beautiful world).

Born right here at home, just like I wish her brother August could have been.

Born alive and healthy, just as I still, often, fervently wish August could have been.

Her personality is emerging. She is hardworking, and spunky, and mostly easygoing, but she also knows what she wants. She expresses her thoughts and needs in definite terms: short, loud little yells that sound like an indignant “Hey!!” or soft, cooing sighs when she nurses that sound as if she’s saying, “Ohhh, this is sooo gooooood…”

And I keep wishing I could have gotten to know her brother the way I am getting to know her.

I wish I could have seen him alive. Seen those bright, sky-blue eyes of his open on their own, instead of having to open them myself and feel shocked by their bright clarity and color, and forever after wonder if I’m misremembering their exact shade of blue. After all, this little girl in my lap, who shares the same DNA as August — her eyes are a much darker, more blueberry shade. Surely his weren’t so bright-blue-sky as I remember them being. I think they were, but there’s no way to know. I saw them once only, and only for one moment. Never again.

Seven weeks and three days of caring for this new, second baby, this little girl in my lap, has consumed my energy, attention, time and emotions. I haven’t thought about August quite so much since his little sister was born. I still think of him every day — I expect that will never change — but now I think most often of this new baby girl.

But then mornings like this come along. I was just going along, feeling so glad and pleased, and so pleased to be pleased, and then something made me Google a woman whose first baby was also stillborn at 41-plus weeks of pregnancy. I read her blog from time to time. I have no idea why reading it again this morning seemed like a good idea. Suddenly tears were welling up and spilling over; snot was dripping; I was trying not to sob out loud, not wanting to disturb this sleeping baby girl in my lap with my noises or my shaking, quaking body.

The sadness, the loss, the grief. Missing that first baby boy, August. Wishing so hard and so futilely that he were here now. All of it. Still so huge, still so deep, even when I forget, for moments at a time, that it’s all still there, a wound I will always carry. A person we love who will always be gone.

8. Sometimes I feel so, so sorry for myself.

Just now I was going through the journal I kept throughout my pregnancy with August, looking for certain data, like how much and what type of warm-up labor I felt leading up to his birth. I came across this entry, written almost three weeks before his birth, about a dream I had forgotten but now remember very well:

Dec. 24, 2009 — 38 weeks and 6 days pregnant!

Baby, you are due a week from tomorrow! Though Michele keeps telling me not to expect you until at least January 8. I’m getting so curious and excited to meet you and see who you are.

I asked my subconscious the other night to tell me when you might be born. I asked to dream a number. So here is what I dreamed:

I came downstairs in the house on Hardouin — the one where I grew up. My dad and brother were sitting in the game room, looking out the window toward the Klines’ house, crying and looking glum. It turned out that a little boy, about five or six years old (January 5th or 6th?), had taken a walk at 5 a.m. (is that the time when you will be born?) with his dog, and had accidentally pulled a tree limb down on himself. It had ripped him in two (is this a birth fear of mine?) and killed him (is that a fear I have about you — that you might die too young?). Are you a boy? When I woke up from the dream I was so sad — achingly, awfully sad — thinking of what it would be like to lose a child. I don’t think I could withstand it. I would want to die too, if you died. I wouldn’t be able to live anymore.

Rereading that entry tonight made me just…weep. I am still weeping. I am shocked by that awful, awesome dream, by its prophetic nature; it’s further proof that I knew. Not consciously, thank goodness; I thank the universe, again and again, for sparing me the information until I absolutely needed to know. But subconsciously, I knew August wouldn’t live. I knew he was a boy, that he would die too young, that I would be lost in devastation, and my family would grieve.

(Here is another post I wrote a while back about indications that on some level, I knew what was going to happen.)

It scares me beyond words, beyond description, to think this new baby, whose due date is tomorrow, could die too. Tonight I found myself telling E that if this baby doesn’t make it, he should put me on suicide watch. I hate saying thoughts like that aloud…I feel like it isn’t nice or right to voice such dark, dark things, even to my husband. (And that, in itself, feels beyond silly to write: It’s not nice to talk about suicide!) And anyway — suicidal, me? Never before. Even in my darkest moments since August died, I never wanted to kill myself. Sometimes I wanted to die, or simply not to wake up, but I never had the urge to do that to myself.

But if I thought I couldn’t withstand the death of one child…I know I couldn’t withstand the deaths of two.

Going to bed now, feeling very, very sorry for myself and for that sweet little baby whom we loved so, so much, who died too young.

7. Sometimes I thought August died because he didn’t want to stay with us.

Six days after August was born and died, a friend of mine sent me these lyrics from a Patti Smith song:

Image from UK painter Mary MacCarthy — click image to visit site

Little emerald bird
wants to fly away
If I cup my hand
could I make him stay?

Little emerald soul
Little emerald eye
Little emerald soul
Must you say goodbye?

All the things that we pursue
All that we dream
are composed as nature knew
In a feather green

Little emerald bird
As you light afar
It is true I heard
God is where you are

Little emerald soul
Little emerald eye
Little emerald bird
We must say goodbye

I just came across them again, 18 months later, and they brought back how horribly devastated and betrayed I felt when he died. I felt like he left us on purpose. I remember our midwife coming over three days after the birth, and asking her, “Why didn’t he want to stick around? We love him so much. We were so ready for him. Why didn’t he want to stay?” She said, “Oh, sweetie, I think he did want to stay. He just couldn’t.”

It’s been over a year and a half and it’s still hard for me to understand. Sometimes I get it: Everyone dies. Some people die much, much younger than anyone expects. That’s what happened to August. That’s all.

But other times it just washes over me as strongly as it did from the start: Why didn’t he stay? Is there anything I could have done to make him stick around? Did he leave because there was something lacking in us, his parents? Something undeserving? Is there greater meaning in his life and death than simple biology?

Did he know how much we loved him and wanted him here with us? And still do?

Is this really a hole that can never, ever be filled?

Will I ever get used to that?

6. Sometimes things get lighter.

Jeez, depression. It’s been heavy lately. I am about 30 weeks pregnant with our second child, and I think I am trying very hard, consciously and subconsciously, to work out how to bring this child safely into the world. August’s birth and death keep coming back to me very presently; I keep entertaining “What if…” kinds of questions that I know are pointless — what happened happened — and yet I’m still not finished asking them. Some of them are silly, silly questions. What if we had known about his encephalocele in advance? Maybe we could have created some kind of sanitary cap, a little plastic dome that he could have worn like a bonnet to protect the opening in his skull; maybe then he could have lived.

Of course not. I know that. But I can’t help wondering, and wishing fervently, and torturing myself — what if there was something we could have done to change this terrible outcome?

Lullaby Raft by Naomi Shihab Nye

I am taking part in a writing workshop for the month of June. Each day, when we come into the room, there are books, mostly children’s books, sitting out on our tables for us to peruse until the day’s agenda begins. This morning, the one at my seat was Lullaby Raft by Naomi Shihab Nye — supposedly a children’s book, but it was so dark, full of words and images about loss, depression, fear of death, hiding in hibernation and hoping you’ll wake up to brightness again. How to cross over safely to the other side. I looked at it for a bit, and then we did our morning writing, and I started out writing about that book, which then led me down the rabbit hole of my own depression and darkness. I wrote:

Sometimes I wonder if I stink of loss. If it’s something that hangs over me, an aura, a miasma that others can sense, from which they shrink back instinctively. The person I used to be: quickly lost patience with people who were just too broken. The person I am now: still that way, though now I am broken, too. But maybe I’m not that broken. Maybe I am still strong, still fierce, still fighting. Despite my moments of wanting to give up; of thinking, defeatedly, What the fuck is this all for? Why are we even doing this? Disaffected. Disconnected. Discombobulated. Growing. Emerging. Resonating. Discordant. Sometimes.

After we write, people can share their pieces if they want. I didn’t mean to read mine aloud, but a few people pushed me in a friendly, persistent way to share, so I did, full of misgivings — I felt so uncomfortable loading my in-my-head blatherings about my personal sadness onto these people whom I still don’t know very well.

The professor who leads the workshop had brought in her yoga instructor to lead a yoga session with us, and he was the first person to speak up in response. He talked about the Buddhist idea that we’re born into this world in a leaky boat. Some people, he said, would see that as, “Oh, shit, this boat is leaky — now I have to figure out how to survive??” And to that, he said, “Well, you don’t have to survive…but you get to, if you just breathe, and blink, and see the goodness that’s always all around you.”

There it was: the simple answer I’ve been looking for for seventeen months now. I’m supposed to just keep living through this? Well, there’s no supposed to about it…it’s a get to kind of a thing. And all I gotta do is breathe, and blink, and see the goodness all around me.

Okay — on a different day, that would not have worked. On a different day, I would probably have rolled my eyes and felt deeply irritated that this guy just did not get it. But today he did get it, and his comment lifted me right out of my shit. A few more people shared their pieces, and then we did an hour of yoga and had smoothies (yoga and smoothies — what a lovely writing workshop this is!). I felt better than I’ve felt in weeks. Cleansed. Lighter. Laughing.

5. Sometimes I wish I could hit the Reset button.

A friend of mine once told me, in the course of a conversation about suicide, that she felt like sometimes, for some people, suicide was a valid choice. “Sometimes,” she said, “things have just gone so badly that a person just needs to call it done; to hit the reset button. To exit this world so they can start over somewhere else, in some other time and place.”

I could almost see the validity of that…almost. But the biggest, most prohibitive problem with suicide, obviously, is that it affects everyone around you hugely, deeply, painfully. The person who commits suicide can just…exit. Everyone else left behind has to face the horror, the devastation, the loss. Their lives have changed irrevocably, forever. That fact, and the fact that I can’t stand to hurt myself in any way (accidentally cutting my finger in the kitchen, for example, turns me into a wailing child; it just seems so unnatural for your flesh to separate like that, to reveal the inside that you’re not supposed to see) — these are two factors that have always kept me from wanting to kill myself, no matter what happened. These, plus my basic, lifelong, unfailing optimism.

But, of course, the optimism disappeared when August died. So many times after that, especially for the first ten or eleven months, I wished I could be suicidal; at least then I would have some control over how I was feeling. Often, I wished fervently not to die, but just not to wake up the next morning. To go into some kind of permanent sleep, in which I could be oblivious to everything that had happened. Sometimes I fantasized about going to all my friends and family members, everyone I loved, and having a serious talk with them: “Look, things really haven’t turned out well, and I just need to go.” I imagined they would be sad but understanding: “Yes, we understand. We will miss you and always love you. Go, with our blessings.” Yeah, right.

Sixteen months later I am still trying to tease apart the strands of my thoughts and feelings, pre- and post-August’s existence, to come to the truth of it all, which I think has something to do with this: Before losing him, I really, truly thought I was lucky — special somehow. I felt a certain inner power to make good things happen simply by focusing my energies, acting, trying. I felt I had a certain power with words and communication, that I could use these to get what I wanted in life. Being a researcher by nature, I felt confident in my ability to find information I needed to know about living a good, healthy life; being reasonably energetic and proactive, I felt able to pursue that good, healthy life.

August’s death changed all of that. Now it’s embarrassing to me to realize I thought I was special. Sometimes I thrash in the unfairness of what happened to him, nearly drown in thoughts of “Why did this have to happen to me?” Always, right on the heels of that thought, is the next, inevitable one: “Who else should it have happened to?” No one deserves to lose their child. No child deserves to die too young. “Deserve” isn’t a part of that equation; it’s just biology, life and death, the conditions that allow us to be conceived, to be born, to keep living, and the ones that don’t. No one is special; no one can escape death, sadness, or unexpected things happening. We’re lucky if we can go a long time with things rolling along pretty smoothly, to our liking. I know now that I got very lucky for 33 years. I like to think that August got lucky for 41-and-a-half weeks — the length of time that he was safe inside me, his encephalocele protected from infection, nothing threatening to take his life away.

Now I feel angry and disappointed. I don’t like how my life has turned out. I know that my life is still here, still in process; I know that August dying is just one thing that changed — one bad thing that happened. I keep reminding myself of that. Except it really changed everything. It infuses and taints everything. It changed how I see myself — before, as a lucky, whole person who had everything she wanted; now, as an unlucky person with something terribly broken about her, with a void that will never, ever be filled — I will always miss him and want him back, and whenever I think of him, it will always be attached to that thwarted, yearning feeling.

The weirdest part of this, to me, is that I don’t look at other people who’ve lost children the way I look at myself. I don’t see them as broken or “too bad” or some kind of life failure; I see them, actually, as full of grace. In some way I really can’t explain, I see them as lucky, as full of radiant strength. But I see myself as exactly the opposite. Now this is my life story, and I don’t like this story at all. I hate to tell it, yet I refuse not to, since it’s mine, and since it seems like people try to keep things like this hidden, as if they’re shameful or unfit to speak about openly, and I don’t want to do that.

Sometimes I think about how becoming a published novelist used to be my biggest dream — the one that, if I couldn’t make it happen, I would feel like a failure, or at least as if my life were unfulfilled. Now, that dream has almost completely receded in the face of my new biggest dream: being a mother to a living, healthy child. That’s now the one that will make me feel unfulfilled, like a failure, if it doesn’t come true. It seems terrible to place such pressure and importance on one thing, but I can’t seem to help it.

4. Sometimes I think, on some level, I knew he was going to die.

There is the journal entry from November 2009, for example, written sitting cross-legged on the floor in the baby’s room, when I was 7 months pregnant. I had turned on the sweet little lights we had set up, one each in three of four corners; they cast a warm, dim glow that I thought wouldn’t be too jarring for the baby if I had to turn on a lamp in the middle of the night.

That November evening, I sat in the baby’s room, crying so hard and simultaneously laughing at myself for it. “I miss you so much,” I wrote in my journal, the one I had kept throughout my pregnancy, recording all the moments and sensations that I didn’t want to forget — my hilariously excessive appetite one night that was my first signal that maybe I was pregnant (somehow I consumed a half-pound of shrimp cocktail as an appetizer, followed by three tilapia fillets, two servings of potatoes, which I normally hate, a pile of greens, six chocolate-chip cookies and a slice of cheesecake; “OK,” I remember thinking, “I’m a pretty good eater, but something is going on here”); the first symptoms I experienced; the first time, at sixteen weeks pregnant, that I concentrated really hard and felt the baby’s tiny movements, deep inside me. “But how can I miss you when you’re right here?” I wrote that night. “In two months, you’ll be in my arms. I’ll be able to look at you and wonder at how incredible you are.”

Well, I did get to do that, for a few hours, anyway.

The feeling I had that night in the baby’s room was definitely one of grief, of missing someone who wasn’t there, or wouldn’t be for long. At the time I just thought it was strange, odd enough to write about in my journal. Now I wonder if it was some sort of deep intuition, an unconscious knowledge of my own body, which included my baby’s body: knowledge that the baby wasn’t okay and would not be sticking around.

I also wonder about my lifelong propensity for that soul-deep feeling of loss, which I could always access pretty easily, long before I ever experienced any great loss in real life. Growing up, any novel or movie about a character losing a loved one sent me into awful, shoulder-shaking, snot-dripping sobs. In Rilla of Ingleside, the last book of the Anne of Green Gables series, Rilla — Anne’s youngest daughter — loses her favorite brother, Walter, when he dies fighting in France during World War I. Rilla’s despair hurt me even more deeply than Anne’s (well, it was Rilla’s story, after all). I wept over that book many times, rereading those scenes again and again and feeling just too much deep, painful empathy for Rilla and her loss.

Another example from four or five years ago: that silly movie P.S. I Love You. I saw it in the theater and embarrassed myself by starting to weep about five minutes in and being unable to stop throughout the movie or even after it ended. I was still shuddering and snorting and wiping my nose as we headed back out to the parking lot, all because Hillary Swank’s character had to say goodbye to her dashing charmer of a husband who had some terminal illness and was destined to die.

Sometimes, before August ever came along, I would consider the possibility of reincarnation and past lives. Maybe, I occasionally thought, in a past life, I had had a lover or a close family member who died. Why else would that particular story line affect me so deeply, when I hadn’t lived through anything remotely similar in my own life?

These days, since August died, I wonder more whether those long-ago moments of grief and deep empathy, experienced while watching a film or reading a book, were not flashbacks to another life, but flash-forwards to my own life — premonitory emotions, shadows of the enormous, crushing heartbreak I would feel when my son died.

3. Sometimes I thought maybe he wasn’t a real baby.

That is tough to admit, to write, but it’s true. In certain moments, I really had that thought — a mad, hysterical notion that August didn’t count, he wasn’t real, and all my sadness was ridiculous, laughable even.

For a long time, there was a strong sense of unreality to the whole experience of losing him. It started the moment we got to the hospital and the nurses began grimly, efficiently rushing around me, sticking things into me, shaving me, prepping for the C-section that would not end up happening because it wasn’t needed. They perform emergency C-sections to save babies in peril. They don’t perform them for babies deemed “incompatible with life,” as August was — babies with no chance of survival.

In the weeks and months that followed August’s death, I felt like a crazy person. I regularly had PTSD-like flashbacks of all those horrendous moments — my midwife barking orders to her apprentices when she decided to transport me to the hospital; my pissed-off, confused question — “The hospital? What are they going to do for me there?” — and her bright, loud, almost sing-song response: “They’re probably going to section you, honey!” A Cesarian section — the thing I had most wanted to avoid. (Since I hadn’t considered my baby’s death as a possibility, that wasn’t on the list of Things To Avoid If Possible.) More horrendous moments: The one when the doctor was saying something to me as I lay on the gurney, frowning and squinting up into the fluorescent lights, and then the midwife leaned over me, took my hands into hers, pressed them and looked hard at me as she said, “Sweetheart, do you understand what they’re telling you?” I frowned harder and searched for understanding. “Yes. They’re saying…there’s something wrong with the baby. They’re saying the baby is going to die.” Her eyes shiny with tears. The doctor looking grim and gray-faced. My own emotional disconnectedness, which set in abruptly with the knowledge that the baby was not going to live, and did not lift until he was lying on my chest, warm and beautiful and dead. All the horrible, unimaginable moments replayed again and again in my mind, shocking me freshly each time.

I was plagued by recurring thoughts, and one of them really made me feel insane: “Maybe August wasn’t a real baby.” I think it was a trick my mind played on me in hopes of escaping the anguish: “He had a birth defect…he wasn’t a real human being…why am I so sad? There’s nothing to be sad about!” This thought kept coming back to me.

On a logical level, I knew very well that it was incorrect, and knowing that made the thought even more twisted and surreal. Of course August was a real human being, a real baby. What was my grief-stricken brain trying to reduce him to — nothing more than an aberration, a mistake, an “oopsy” on the road of my and E’s lives? What a sickening insult to him. I felt awful about it, and took to reminding myself whenever needed: He was our son, and he had died.

But as hard as I tried, for a long time I just couldn’t absorb it. And so, sometimes, my brain rejected it, and him, as fantasy.

I was so glad, several months later, when those thoughts stopped coming — when I finally, fully accepted that August had been real, he had been here and ours, and he had died.

Well — I’m still working on accepting that last part. I still don’t understand how to accept a truth that seems so utterly wrong, alien and unwanted.