No Answers

Emily Dickinson wrote in one of her poems something along the lines of "Because I could not stop for death, it kindly stopped for me" and I think of those words while I also think of the poem I put up in my last post. The inequity of death, the inevitability of it, the fact that because I have given my children life I've also given them death, just as my mother did for me, and her mother before her. I've given birth to death quite literally, with the birth of Ben, as have many of you who read this blog. I am still trying to fathom it, four years on: giving birth to one already dead. Or delivering one already dead - a semantic difference I hate, for officially it isn't birth when your child has died in utero - and there are no birth certificates, no apt words to describe what it is a mother does when she has to bring forth her dead child into the world.

And I wonder what happens when we die; where do our souls go, if there is any such thing at all? Some days I believe in god and heaven, some days I don't. Some days I think that there is nothing out there and it terrifies me, then other days I think, no, that can't be so. Where is Ben now? And I don't know, other than in my heart. But is that all we get? That he lives on in my heart, and I will never get to know him in any other kind of lifetime? Perhaps it is.

I think as well that the universe owes me the safety and comfort of knowing my two living children will live on to ripe old ages, outlast me by years, but no one is given even that, no matter how much we may beg the gods that be. I remember, months after Ben died, kneeling by the side of my daughter's bed, sobbing, snot running down my face, pleading with god to not let anything happen to her, to keep her safe. Like the mother in the poem I think of all the things that could happen, but I know I need to let my children go - and let go, and let go. All my life, I will need to let them go.

Living Children

I have two living children, one from "before" and one from "after." Charlotte was 16 days away from her 3rd birthday when Ben died; James was born 20 months after Ben's death. I remember writing in my journal at some point after losing Ben, that I wonder if Charlotte will grow up to think of us as always being sad. Will she always feel she missed out on getting to know us as happy people? Will there always be a sense of something missing - whether that be her brother or something in her parents? I'm afraid she'll feel that we were never wholly there for her after Ben died. I realize she won't have much, if any, memory of life before Ben - I guess that's what worries me. We were different people then, different parents. I'm afraid her life will be forever tainted by Ben's death, and she'll feel cheated out of us because of it.

Maybe I'm not making any sense, but I wonder what she'll think and feel in 10 and 20 years, about what might have been, what was, what wasn't. Part of me died the day I lost Ben, and that part of me can never return. I hope she can forgive me if I'm not the mother I could have been.