8 days later

Whenever I heard stories of a couple losing their baby, or child, I always wondered how the family coped.  How did they find the energy, the strength, the fortitude to get up every.single.day and wash, rinse, repeat.  How does a couple found a way to wake up every.single.day knowing that their lives are never, ever going to be the same.  How they would be able to look at each other without getting lost in grief, remembering what they almost had, or what they could have had if only the stars had aligned differently.

But then, suddenly, it does happen to you.  You're sitting there one day, grasping the hand of your partner, hoping with every ounce of energy, that you are going to hear good news.  But it doesn't come. (In my case, the bad news just didn't stop coming, but that's for later in the story.) You find your grasp becoming firmer and firmer, until it suddenly goes limp, and your hand is hanging there.  You feel like all of you is hanging there.  That you're slowly, but perpetually falling and there's no bottom to this cliff; there's no valley; there's not even a hell.  This perpetual drop (which also proves that gravity is much stronger than 9.8m/s^2) is in fact endless.  You'll spend days, weeks, month, or some inordinate amount of time in this free fall.  People tell you not to mark time by the loss.  That when the leaves change you shouldn't say, "He would have been 'x" now." or, "We would have been preparing the nursery now.  The crib would be arriving any day." because it's unhealthy.  It's not part of moving on.  And, at the end of the day, we need to move on.  We need to find a way to function on a daily basis knowing that the future that we were led to expect, is no longer our future.  That with the flip of a switch, that has changed.

I'm new to this free fall this time around, but in the grand scheme of things, I have lost before.  I lost in February 2007 - it was the one time C and I forgot to use protection, and 2 weeks later I was staring at a positive line.  We were engaged at the time, and we had no idea how we would proceed.  Little did I know that we wouldn't even have to decide because I miscarried.  Honestly, it could have even been a CP; the only evidence the doctor had of my pregnancy was the positive urine test.  We never did a blood test as I wasn't sure how we were going to proceed with the pregnancy.

I miscarried again last July, but that was *sigh* by choice, and a choice that will now haunt me for the rest of my life.  My therapist continuously tells me that karma doesn't work that way, and that I am now not being punished for my decision, but it's still difficult to keep my mind from going there.  It wants to go there because it wants to place blame, it wants a reason, it wants answers for what happened this time around.  I chose to terminate because I was taking class x medications at the time of conception, and even for a week or two after as I wasn't expecting to be pregnant.  All of my doctors were in agreement with my decision to terminate.

My loss in January is documented earlier in this blog, and I don't want to rehash it here.  Perhaps I will at a later point, but I want to be able to delve into the grief that my husband and I are feeling now as it's paramount on my mind, and is our current hell.