Because every story continues beyond "The End."

"How do we ever prove what we have lost? Who weighs it, quantifies it?"

Emily Rapp's words rattle around in my head, taking away my ability to focus on blogging, on Clark clicking and cooing from his car seat, from the words I can't form into real thoughts in my head but still feel this insane drive to share and communicate and cry out.

Rapp returns to my Baby Loss Mama world with her latest essay "Proof of Loss," a sort of post script of her book "The Still Point of the Turning World."

Read her essay at The Sunday Rumpus: http://therumpus.net/2014/01/the-sunday-rumpus-essay-proof-of-loss/

Rapp's 6-month-old son, Ronan, was diagnosed with Tay-Sachs, a fatal autosomal recessive disorder with no treatment and no cure. He died just before his third birthday. Rapp's book chronicles Ronan's diagnosis and long journey to death. Her essay extends the reach of her story as she reveals that she is divorced and pregnant by her new partner. She is expecting a baby girl.

The essay answers a lot of questions without posing them as answers to inquiries, just statements of new fact. An unapologetic update of sorts. I am guilty of holding other Baby Loss Mamas to my own fire - I want to poke my nose in their lives and ask how they deal with a live baby up against the loss of a dead one. I want to know why their marriages failed and what I can do differently to protect my own partnership. I want to learn from the very smallest details of their journeys - the things I would never want anyone else to know about my own life after two terminations. I want to pick apart their behaviors and learn from their mistakes while patterning my mental health after their successes.

I want a roadmap, damn it, and I want it now.

No one gives me this "guide to the endless sorrow" that I so crave, including Rapp. It frustrates me as I read every word, tears rolling down my cheeks as I commiserate with the wrung-out emotions of loss relived over and over again in my mind, as I work my days around loosely controlled STUGS.

In "Proof of Loss," Rapp expresses that loss is ultimately measured by how we strive to live after the loss. It's ultimately what comes after we say goodbye.

In a way, that makes Clark my proof of loss. He is what I have gained, along with a larger sense of universe, a deeper understanding of myself and the ability to hold grudges and forgive at the same time but not to the same people.

I can tell you right now that Clark is the best of this proof, though I wonder if he got the worst of me - the me that is left over after the carnage. The pieced-together, patched-together, duct taped together mom that comes to terms with her genetically victimized self about every other day, but still wallows in the depths of grief on the diagonal every other days.

I am well aware that I have moved on, the world has moved on, from my tragedies - but the deaths of my sons hold me to an emotional place I can't ever leave. I feel like the finality of their deaths is like a stake through my flesh, pinning my body down in a spot I can't ever leave. The body moves forward even when the heart is stuck in a cemetery.

I suppose it all comes back to what I say over and over and over again and only sometimes believe: my personal mantra - Clark fixes nothing. He brings nothing back. He is not the embodiment of his dead brothers. He is not here to save his mother from herself.

I love him fiercely but independently of my grief. I am grateful for him, what he brings to our family and to our lives, but I also know there are things I can't expect of him or of me as I walk even deeper into my grief while ultimately living away from my past.

I am not so healed as I once imagined I was. I am not so far into understanding myself - the old me that I hated and the new me that I hate even more. That is its own kind of loss.

STUGS in the opposite direction

Today I had a breakdown over salad and soup at Bob Evan's restaurant.

There was nothing wrong with my soup. I was eating and watching Clark sleep in his car seat when tears overcame me. There are these moments when it just hits me; the overwhelming loss for John and Drew slammed up against the overwhelming blessing of Clark.

This isn't always a general feeling of love and loss. Actually, it usually starts when my mind travels back to micro memory - a tiny snippet of a larger crushing moment. Today's STUG was brought on as I was thinking of John's funeral. I had wrapped his tiny marble urn in a soft fleece blanket and I had to hand the bundle over to be placed in the vault. I actually hugged the bundle just before I handed it over and I was overwhelmed by how cuddly it was. I had been holding a hard urn for weeks...and that moment with the blanket was the closest I ever came to snuggling with a soft baby.

Watching Clark snuggled in a blanket, knowing that he is mine to hold, just did me in. This nbcn line between living children and dead children is going to be tough to toe.

out of nowhere

Goddamn STUGS. I'm fine one minute and a mess the next. Ugh.

Birth Story - 39 weeks

As I write this post, there is a tiny baby squirming and kicking and hiccuping in the clear plastic crib next to me. He is more than viable, more than possible - he is HERE and he is PERFECT.

I knew I was in labor just after midnight. The contractions went from painless to not so painless. I ironed a week's worth of my husband's work clothes - a goal I had set early in my pregnancy in case I went into labor before I was actually "ready."

By 1 a.m. I was hurting so badly, but I went to the bathroom and found my bloody show. I tiptoed into my bedroom to wake my husband - "Honey, wake up. We're having a baby."

He shot out of bed like his pants were on fire. It was time to go.

We dropped off our daughter at the babysitter and timed my contractions with an iPhone app. In what seemed like no time at all, we were at the hospital in Triage. A quick check and I was 5 centimeters. An epidural killed my pain and I was able to sleep for a few hours. I felt something running down the back of my leg - another quick check and I was ready.

"Let's meet your baby," the doctor said.

"I like your style," I said.

Four contractions, eight pushes and 10 minutes later, Clark came screaming into this world. The nurse surprised me by placing him on my chest right away. I was in shock. He was here. He was breathing. There was nothing wrong. There was nothing wrong!

I had spent so much time waiting and preparing and worrying over this baby that I hadn't really honestly considered what it would be like to have him here. The nurses cleaned him up and handed him to my husband.

I will never, not as long as I live, forget the look on my husband's face as he held our living baby for the first time. I remember the look on his face when we held Drew, that little tiny body - so underdeveloped and flawed but so perfect and beautiful at the same time - and I remember the feeling of holding something we created together - something gone.

The mere idea that we could hold this living baby and take him home and raise him - I could not stop crying.

The joy of the day had an undercurrent of sadness for the boys we never got to comfort and swaddle and snuggle. It is not lost on us that this joy could have been ours twice before, that all we ever wanted for them was here with us now. Such deep grief I'm afraid will be perennial in our lives and in Clark's. We will, undoubtedly, mark each of his milestones on behalf of his brothers. He is our barometer on how they would have lived.

Now I spend hours just watching Clark sleep. I can't take my eyes off of him - he is so perfect. I don't mind getting up with him at night, I enjoy every bottle and diaper change. I know that nothing can be as precious and sacred as this experience, as this baby, who I carry in my arms AND in my heart.

Quite a jump - 38 weeks

So I held off writing anything until now because at my last posting, Clark was in the 21st percentile in size and while the doctors were "watching the situation" I was "freaking the hell out."

I went in for an ultrasound yesterday and it turns out our little Clark had a growth spurt - he is now in the 50th percentile. Go figure.

While nothing but relief washes over me, my husband is losing his mind - and not slowly. He is anxious to the point of being short and sometimes mean. I am hormonal to the point of being exhausted and sometimes weepy. It's not a good combination, especially for a pair that hardly ever bicker or fight.

He wants Clark here NOW. We discussed induction with our high risk OB, but she said the hospital will not do it without good reason - restricted size is a good reason - but Clark is no longer in that category. I am grateful to have a baby so healthy that medical intervention is actually denied. My husband pouted all the way out to the car because he wanted a baby NOW.

So a compromise is in order. We will schedule an elective induction on my due date - Dec. 29 - with the hopes that he comes just a little bit sooner all by himself. That's just nine more days.

As for pregnancy stuff, I am scatterbrained and exhausted. Carrying around 50 (50!!!) extra pounds is weighing on me physically and emotionally. I can't get comfortable at night and last week I was so dehydrated that I had to spend the day in triage getting some miracle IV. I have all the complaints of a very pregnant woman - swollen feet and hands, I waddle when I walk, Braxton Hicks contractions, weepiness and moodiness. My belly button is gone - yikes.

But Clark is active and healthy with a strong heartbeat and all the right organs in all the right places. Right now I don't care when he comes - just as long as he comes.

Holidays and grief - Week 38

Oh, unhappiness in a happy time - Christmas is here.

I struggle with the holidays. I know I'm not alone - there is just something about happy people all around me that makes my wounds throb a little harder, makes my tears a little hotter, makes my soul a little more raw.
John would be two. This would be Drew's first Christmas, the one with the special "My First Christmas" bib and a little bow tie outfit to wear for goofy holiday photos. I can't even bring myself to hang up to ornaments with their names engraved on them. I can't do it. It hurts.

I do have a photo I did last year of their little footprint cards from the hospital and put them in a holiday frame to be put out every year, but how strange to take a family portrait this year and frame it and place it next to those little footprints. It reminds me, never subtlely, that they are supposed to be here, that we should be baking more cookies and wrapping more presents and creating more memories and new photographs together.

The feeling overwhelms me. The grief washes over me nearly every day. Something - two somethings - are missing. That isn't ever going to change. I'm glad I took the photo of their footprints nestled in a holiday wreath - I'm glad I have at least that.

It's Always Something - Week 36

These last few weeks have been hard on my physically - walking hurts, sleeping hurts, sneezing hurts. I have nosebleeds most days and swollen feet most nights.

But by far, by far, by far, my hardest pain is emotional. I've been sticking out the STUGS (sudden, temporary uprising of grief), which catch me when my mind wanders beyond my emotional fences. I cry in the shower and in the car on the way to work. I cry for John and Drew and for my grandmother, I cry for Emily and her emotional issues - so gradually heaped onto her slight shoulders by dead brothers, emotionally checked out mothers and abandonment by a bio dad she struggles to remember properly.

Then the Universe decides to give me something to cry about: Clark is measuring small.

It was mentioned at our last ultrasound that his femurs were slightly short and his measurements were between the 10th and 20th percentile. Now, a month later and back in the ultrasound room, we find out that the measurements have gotten no better. He has grown, but not at a rate that would have him catching up.

My little guy really is a little guy and now I am so, so, so afraid for him. I'm desperate to deliver him now because I trust the doctors and the specialists to keep him alive far more than I would ever trust my own body.

So though I cry, though I mourn, though I worry - now my STUGs are more about what could happen instead of what has already happened. I just want to curl up in my bed and stay there until I know he is here and here to stay. I have not felt like this in months. I became one of those naive mamas expect happy pregnancies, easy births and healthy babies.

Ugh. Story of my life. How many times must one woman learn the same lesson the hard way?