loving and losing

Friday morning I woke up, and I knew. It’s coming.
I felt the anger, anxiety and crippling sadness well up within me, but I wasn’t ready to lose myself to it.
Instead, I was ready to be soothed by the cabin, our cherished getaway. I spent nearly all my time around the crackling fire. Crossword puzzling, reading, drinking coffee. At night I set up a bed in the family room, snuggled under a pile of quilts and watched the embers burn, willing them to melt away the ice I’ve packed around my heart.

Saturday I woke up and I thought it had passed.
We hiked to a view that feels like ours, after twenty-some years of reaching the same familiar outcropping of rocks and looking down at the same familiar lake where I used to swim and paddle and skate. I gulped in the sweet mountain air and for a little while I forgot that I am sad.

Sunday the dam burst open. I went from being energized from my morning walk to suddenly feeling suffocated by all the remembering. I picked a fight with Andy (over a biscuit, of all things) and I spiraled out of control until I realized where it was all coming from (hint: not the biscuit). Just when I’d think I couldn’t cry any more, more tears would come. I kept telling myself you knew this was going to happen, just let it happen. But knowing doesn’t make the happening any easier, and I spent the rest of the afternoon in a heap of pillows and tissues.

I am tired of loving and losing. I am tired of falling apart. I am tired of forcing myself awake at night because all I see when I close my eyes is a hospital bed and all I hear are screams.

Sometimes a hurt is so deep deep deep
You think that you're gonna drown
Sometimes all I can do is weep weep weep
With all this rain falling down

I’ll hold it together for a little while, an hour or a day or even a few days. Then it hits me: I was pregnant, and now I am not. I am reliving the pain of losing John while also experiencing a new pain — the pain of losing two. The pain of opening my heart up to hope again only to hold that hope dead in my arms.

Today is (was?) my due date for Jane, the little girl of my dreams. I woke up to an extra long hug from my husband, who later called me and sweetly asked if I’d like to meet him for lunch at the new burger place in town. (He knows the way to my heart.) Now I will read and later we will finish our jigsaw puzzle and watch a movie and if I stand in the shower and cry for a little while it will be okay, because I know that at some point I will get out, at some point my tears won’t be so frequent and some day this awful, piercing ache will dull.



some photos from the weekend… I am thankful for moments like these — when I feel a break from my suffering, when I feel a little bit like the old me.