I opened it today and cried, cried, cried. Today my grief feels so heavy. I had a few weeks where things seemed to be getting better. [“Getting better” – I use those words carefully because how could things ever really get better when I’ll never get to see you or hold you again? At least, not in this lifetime. Maybe when I pass. For that I pray. When I say “getting better,” what I mean is that I have been more functional and less consumed by my grief.]

And then last night and today it hit me like a ton of bricks again. I’ve been moving things around in preparation for our move move back to LA, and I ended up going through your memory box that Tiffaney the nurse gave us in the hospital. Your feet Noa. They were so tiny! And your hat, still smells like your precious little head. You are my firstborn, my daughter, you always will be. I would give anything for things to have ended differently.

So many questions remain. Why were you taken from me? Why did I not deserve you? Why do other moms get to keep their baby and I could not? Did G-d decide that I wasn’t fit to be your mother? Was I not worthy? You were perfect, and me, I am a mess. Maybe I really didn’t deserve you. Maybe I was too ungrateful during pregnancy. I had no concept of what it meant to be your mom. I was so messed up Noa and I still am. I did many things wrong and sometimes I feel I am being punished. But what kind of G-d punishes a woman in this way? It’s too cruel. There has to be something more. Another explanation. Something bigger than me. I just can’t make sense of it yet.

All I know for sure is that I miss you so much that my longing for you reverberates throughout my bones. It’s a dull, ringing pain that never leaves, and sometimes something triggers a much sharper piercing pain within. I guess from now on, I’ll never know what kind of day I’m going to have. Just the slightest innocent thing can set me off. Last night it was that your dad spent time with an old friend who happened to be 26 weeks pregnant. I was 26 weeks pregnant when I found out you were gone. Gone are those days of pregnancy bliss. Gone is my innocence, and gone is my sense of safety and security. Gone is my wholeness of a person. I really feel as though I am broken now, I have trouble seeing the bright side of things at all. I go through the motions, but I don’t feel true joy anymore. I just keep going because people tell me to. They tell me to get through the days, because one day the pain won’t be so all-consuming, one day I will feel true joy again.

Hi Baby. It’s been 5 weeks and a day since I delivered and met you. Today I’d be 32 weeks 1 day pregnant with you. Unbelievable.  Lately, as in the past week or maybe even two, I have felt numb most of the time, and also in shock and utter disbelief. My grief is definitely changing, though not in the way I expected. I have moved from a very deep sadness and emptiness to a strangely familiar feeling, almost as if I am looking at myself from outside my body, like I am an outsider to my own soul. I can’t help but think that the change is a direct result of the increase in medication. It certainly has made coping with your loss easier in the sense that I am no longer paralyzed by my sadness, but it is also disturbingly numbing. Now, I can get through a day and function, and I’m not sure if that’s because I have moved through some of my grief, or if the medication is just literally numbing my pain, thereby allowing me to function as a human in society again. I can get out and go for walks. I can make myself meals. I can clean up after myself. I can get out of bed. These are big changes. But with them comes a different kind of emptiness, because I truly feel numb. I honestly do miss the days when I would cry all day, deep and gutteral, for you. In those moments, I felt you close to me. Now, it seems like it was all just a crazy, horribly cruel nightmare. There is nothing like meeting your firstborn baby, having been previously a stranger to the unique love that forms between mom and baby, then knowing this for the first time, and not being able to take you home? Empty arms.

I just feel a distance now, and often I can’t believe what happened. It just seems unreal that I held you inside me for 26 weeks and 6 days without even the slightest notion that something so horrific could happen. I had an innocence then that I will never get back. There will never be anything that even remotely comes close to what it was like to be pregnant with you. Pregnant with you I was mostly care-free. My biggest fears were getting sick after finishing breakfast. Pregnancy now evokes feelings of fear and dread. I can’t imagine doing it again, and yet, I feel such a long to do it again. I miss carrying you so much. I am such a different person now, and maybe that is where part of the distance I feel between my former self and myself now lies. Maybe I am just trying to figure out who I am now, after. Now, there is only before and after. Two completely different lives, two completely different people.