Here and healthy

Elizabeth Ann was born alive and well on Wednesday. They gave me a mirror so I could watch over the drape as she she came out. With only her head out, she started screaming. Once the rest of her was out she was screaming and squirming hard.

Her birth deserves a fuller story, but I'm not up to telling it right now. I just wanted those of you who don't know me elsewhere to know that she is here and well.

Today I'm straddling the line between my baby born just yesterday and my baby who died three years ago tomorrow. I'm tired, so there is more to say, but it will have to be said later.

And so it goes

I read these lines on another blog today:

Death and birth. Joy and sorrow. A beautiful cycle  so very full and intermingling. And so it goes.

Ah, but it's easier to see the beauty in the cycle when the death comes at the end of a long, full life.

***
In early December 2007, Henry was getting poised for discharge, and my friend Amy's dad died. Even for him, the end was too soon, but when I went to the wake, her mom told me she had been thinking about the circle of life, her husband passing and Henry on the upswing. Weeks later, when she came to Henry's funeral, all I could think was that they weren't both supposed to go, that Henry was just starting his go round.
***

I am not unsympathetic to this woman who just lost her grandmother. It is only in the last few years that I have realized my own grandmother is mortal. She is still going strong at 94. She has been slowly slowing down, but she still amazes me. In such a life, I can see the cycle as it should be, the sorrow still coming with the end, yet the knowledge that a life was fully lived.

Maybe Henry's life was fully lived. Maybe he did all he was meant to do. But I think of how much he never did, will never get to do. I think of what I will never do with him, never see him do, and it feels incomplete.
***

Death, birth, joy, sorrow.
And so it goes.

One Month

Kathleen is one month old today. I've spent the last year counting days without someone. It is nice to mark a month of counting days with someone.

One month and a few hours ago, I heard her cry for the first time, a strong, lusty, insistent wail, and I began weeping. She was here. She was okay.

With those first cries, the first assurances that she was okay, I let go of the anxiety that had been building throughout my pregnancy. Building, building, building. I was so on edge. I was afraid she would have a heart defect like Henry, afraid she would have another major health issue that we had not looked for or looked for but not seen. I was afraid she would need oxygen, be sent to the NICU, come home with equipment, or not come home at all. I was afraid of all the things that I knew could go wrong because they had for us—ambulance rides, codes, surgery, infection—and all the things I now knew could go wrong because I had met other babylost mamas and heard their stories, absorbed their losses.

As we got closer to her birth, I inexplicably gained a some confidence that she would be born alive and healthy, but I became terrified of her getting sick soon after birth. Why was I having a baby in cold and flu season? How would we negotiate the holidays and all the people who were sure to want to see her?

We've been careful. I do make people wash hands before touching her. I have limited visitors some, especially kids. But hearing her cry eased my anxiety. Yes, I'd love to keep her from getting a cold or the ugly stomach bug that's been going around, but I am no longer paralyzed by the thought. I realized that the anxiety had dissipated while we were still in the hospital.

I didn't realize until later that I had let go of an even deeper seated fear—or perhaps that it had let go of me. Since May 2007, when we learned that Henry's small to moderate VSD was in fact a larger, more serious AV canal defect that would require surgery, I have lived with fear. Fear about his health, fear of his surgery, fear when he was rehospitalized for his health, that we would never go home, only briefly that he would die. That fear should have died when he did, but somehow it was buried under my grief and never really left me. And then I got pregnant again and the fear bubbled up again. With Kathleen's birth, it seems to have left. I didn't realize the depth of that fear, the strength of it, until it was gone. It is a relief.

So one month—one month with Kathleen, one month without fear.