A Great Many Things

“[I]f this life of ours Be a good glad thing, why should we make us merry Because a year of it is gone? but Hope Smiles from the threshold of the year to come,  Whispering 'it will be happier'...”  ―  Alfred, Lord Tennyson I'll just come out and say it. On the sliding scale of my favorite holidays, New Year is at the bottom. It's just always made me kind of sad; even when I was little, New Year's was a total downer. Sure it was fun getting to stay up way past my bedtime and drink the sparkling grape juice and eat all the finger foods that Mom had prepared for us, but all in all, it was always anticlimactic and somewhat terrifying. I get it. The promise of a new year is exhilarating. It really is. I just very rarely saw it that way. To me, the prospect of a new year and all the unknowns was unsettling. As a reminder, I am the  child who used to have a panic attack when I really sat down and thought about the infinite nature of space. I am the child who used to...

Tomorrow is Pregnancy & Infant Loss Remembrance Day, and I will be lighting not one, but two candles at 7:00 P.M. as a way of simultaneously grieving and celebrating our sweet babies. You can view the original post about my miscarriage this summer  here.  I feel compelled to write this post tonight because I just have an intuitive feeling that someone needs to see it. Of course I may be wrong, but when I originally wrote about my miscarriage in June, I heard from dozens, even scores, of my friends and family about their own miscarriages. So many beautiful, precious women in my life had gone through the same visceral, oppressive grief I was experiencing, and I cannot tell you how sincerely blessed I felt to hear each of their stories in my time of need. Each story and baby remembered gave me comfort that I was not alone and that there was life after loss.  I feel like I've processed the loss of this baby much better than I thought I would, but there is no gett...

When my grandmother died suddenly almost six years ago, I was devastated. Even though I got to say a technical goodbye as she lay dying, there was still so much I had to say since her passing was so unexpected. So I wrote her a letter. I read it at her funeral service, and then she was buried with it. It may seem silly to some people that I didn't just say all these things to my grandmother in one touching made-for-tv-movie-esque scene as she was on her deathbed, but I physically could not find the words to say the things I needed to say in that setting: hospital, machines, panic, grief. I needed to be removed from that reality to gather my thoughts, and it was important to me to be able to say the things I said in the way that I said them. At my grandfather's funeral service a few weeks ago, the pastor invited family members up to the pulpit to share, but no one came. I had thought about writing something to read at his funeral, but I didn't know if I would be allowed to...

Therefore, let those who suffer according to God's will entrust their souls to a faithful Creator while doing good. ((1 Peter 4:19)) Well...here goes. I have lived every pregnant woman's worst nightmare over the past two weeks. Let me begin by saying that I am not writing for sympathy; I am not writing for attention; I am writing only for healing. I want to write all of the wonderful, painful details before time begins to blur them. I'm not a dancer or a singer or an artist (at least I haven't been for a looong time), but I am  a writer. It is my release. And boy do I need some release right now. So here is my cathartic opus.  Patrick & I decided that we would like to have Baby #2 around the time that Lucy turned three (which is next summer) because it was the perfect spacing in our minds. By then Lucy would be potty trained, in a big girl bed, and relatively cognizant of and comfortable with her role as a Big Sister, but she wouldn't be so much older...