Knowing

It seems as if autumn is suddenly upon us. Today is chilly, and a light rain is falling. More sunny days are in store for us before winter though, I know.

I'm sitting with a lot of pain in this world lately. I attended a Share meeting the other day, the first time in a while since we stopped going as regular participants last winter. There were many in attendance, many faces of grief: one couple who have no living children because of half a dozen miscarriages and a stillbirth 5 years ago; another who lost their pregnancy at 14 weeks, just when they thought the pregnancy would work out and they started buying baby things; another whose 2-week-old son died of SIDS a year ago; and a couple new to the group whose son was fine and healthy in utero, but had a horrifically botched delivery at term and died 2 days later.

We spoke a lot about how to acknowledge our children when others react thoughtlessly or awkwardly. "You can have another one," "You have other children," or clamming up completely. At first I used to tell people who asked if Felix was our only child that we had a daughter who died in my 8th month of pregnancy. Sometimes it felt right, sometimes it made me angry when the reaction made me feel like a freak. Every so often I talk about Elise to someone who asks, but for the most part I keep her to myself, like a special hiding place I don't want anyone to violate. And that feels right too. I'm protecting her because I am her mother. And I'm protecting myself above all.

I think of Elise and all the loved ones who have gone as existing in another realm, where we the living can't see or hear them. Just as we are ignorant of so many things in this existence--who we really are, what another is thinking, why the world is so messed up--we simply can't fathom those things that aren't right in front of our faces. But we can feel them. I feel Elise with me all the time. This morning as I ran with Genki through thickets of aspen and cottonwood by Sourdough Creek, I thought of the places I'd been with Elise while she was inside me. We went to Hawaii for her cousin's high school graduation, to Tokyo where I had such fun visiting old haunts and seeing grad school friends, to Lindberg Lake where we camped and swam. She heard the voices of her papa and her big brother, and all of my family members when we visited Hawaii and they came to visit us that August.

I felt Elise moving inside me for the first on the way home from Tokyo. I was sitting sleepless on the plane, crying about my aunts not wanting to see me. My attention immediately focused on her when I felt that ripple in my belly from her. "You know what is most important," she seemed to say.