My glass heart

If you squeeze a hen too hard the eggshell inside her will break.

Sometimes I feel like my heart is healing. Or that it is starting to be protected again. By a thin glass transparent heart shell.

But squeeze me a a little too hard and that thin glass shell will break and sliver into a thousand piercing shards.

Every moment.

Three and a half years old you would be. Three and a half. I miss you so much my sweet, sparkly Eva girl. There are days I still cannot comprehend that you are gone forever and ever until I die. There are days when I just can't believe I'm here living and that to other people I look whole when there is always a giant hole in my heart and my mind never lets you go. And I don't talk to other people about you as much as I once did. Maybe they think I have forgotten you and so don't mention your name either for fear I will suddenly remember and break down. But nothing could be further from the truth. You are always on my mind and always in my heart. Every moment you are with me and I think how the moment would have been different if you were physically a part of it. 

Every moment you are with me,

April 14 2014

Today is a sweet bitter day as we celebrate Nathan's first birthday and yet my grief runs afresh for never having Eva's first to celebrate except to eat cake she would never taste and sing to an empty chair.

Celebrating my little boy today, missing my girl and giving up my dream of ever having my own baby girl to raise. 

Shopping for a gravestone

I've been shopping a lot these past couple of weeks.

Shopping for a gravestone. I looked online and I ordered catalogues in the mail. Who knew you could order catalogues of gravestones? I didn't. I guess I've been sheltered.

One of the weirdest things is that in these catalogues are pictures of real gravestones that the company made.  And I know some of the people on the gravestones. It makes me feel weird inside to think that Eva's gravestone might one day appear in this commercial catalogue.

When Eva first died I wanted to bury her and Mike wanted to cremate her. I say 'wanted' very loosely here because what both of us really wanted was to hold our living, breathing daughter in our arms. I strongly felt like I wanted a place to 'go'. Mike felt otherwise and really I didn't care that much. I just wanted Eva. Eva died in August and that first winter I was 'happy' she was cremated and home with us and 'warm' in the living room and not frozen under a blanket of snow. The mind works in mysterious ways...

So anyway, I'm feeling like getting a gravestone and burying her ashes. Mikes mom and dad and my mom will all be buried there and so will mike and I, when the time comes, so she will be with family. And, you know she's not going to get married or have children so being with grandma, grandpa , Oma, mom and dad...well, that's the family she has, and she will not be cold in winter or scared of the dark because she is warm and blooming in heaven and laughing where the light of God shines always.

But, still, it's weird you know, shopping for a gravestone for your daughter...not something I ever signed up for...and I never thought I would compare prices...but there's over a thousand dollars difference in the places I've looked at for a comparable not very large monument. I hate thinking about the money but, well, why not? If I were helping her shop for a wedding dress the price would be a factor too I'm sure...

The journey to old.

I am feeling old.

Not really old. But old to be bearing children. I'm not really that old but age is how you feel I guess, and I feel old. Or at least on the journey to old.

I am tired.

And I am hopeful. Tremblingly hopeful this baby might be the Hope of my dreams, but afraid to hope too much because a boy would be loved all the same.

And I feel like there are places in my heart that can only be healed by the touch of my own baby girl, Eva's sister. I could be wrong. But, I don't think so.

And I am also afraid of a girl. Afraid of the emotions that would well up in me if we had a girl. Afraid of being over the top paranoid about a baby girl. Afraid of her dying too, like her sister.

I feel like this is the end of my journey through birth. And I am not sad. About that. We will never make the mistake we made in February 2011 again, so, I could be wrong about that too, but I don't think so.

And so I hope and fear and love all in one breath.

For Eva's sister. Or another brother.