Growing Edges
Aja-lexaArchive for November 23, 2008
November 21
I get on myself sometimes for remembering little things about her life — the dates of important medical events within the same 10-week period every year and, indeed, specific dates during my pregnancy with her — but today I realized something: the slow-motioned, emotional and mental chaos in her hospital room after she suddenly died that morning in 2000 allowed only for the grieving of that moment: our baby girl, whom we were told would pull through, hadn’t.
The six hours following the nurse’s call to our room passed in paradoxical fast-forward/slow motion, yet I remember the sounds, the smells, the sights of everything that day with amazing clarity.
All I had the capacity to grieve was that Richard and I would have to go home without her, have to face the confused look on her siblings’ faces when we came home without their baby sister.
I felt that day as we left the hospital that my heart would never smile again. The pain was so profound.
We spent that rare, sunny November day making funeral arrangements and picking the place where she would be buried…under a gigantic weeping willow tree. It was perfect spot for her in so many ways.
I hadn’t expected how grief’s journey would strengthen me through unexpected remembrances and ponderings. Because I hadn’t had the time in those moments before the doctor shut down the ventilator to grieve the lifetime of memories that would never be, I find myself giving pause to include her in the moments of my life.
And I wonder things like, would she have curly hair like her older sister, or would her hair have been more wavy like her oldest sis?
Would she have been extroverted like me, or more of an introvert like her dad?
Would our personalities clash?
Would she be ticklish?
What would her giggle sound like?
I really like to ponder such things; it makes me feel good to have the awareness of Riál in my consciousness even though my arms have been without her for eight years.
© Alexa Lopez, 2008
Growing Edges 