Someone out there kindly emailed me, someone who’d also lost her baby. She recommended some blogs, and the one I’ve been reading, starting from when she lost her daughter Eliza, has been maybe the only helpful thing I’ve read or seen or heard the last week. She is a wonderful writer who puts pain and grief and guilt and confusion and sorrow into words in ways I’m unable to. Her knowledge of literature brings in quotes and excerpts from many that I just have to copy. So Brooke, forgive me, if I’m leaning on some of these words, and take them right off of the pages of your blog and record them here.
Where did you come from,
Baby Dear?
Out of the everywhere,
Into the here!“But I can only believe that when Eliza left us here, she went back into the everywhere.
And I can only hope that it was peaceful for her, that she just slipped away surrounded by warmth and love and the sound of my heart beating for her.“
-bythebrooke.blogspot.com 1/28/11
I read these last lines and burst into sobs (not that I don’t do that anyway)… imagining Avalon, her healthy, strong beating heart stopping as she passed out of me, and back into “everywhere”. And all along I had only one concern, will she suffer?
Everyone kept saying no, she wouldn’t, but how could they know? The words Brooke wrote here made me believe, just a little bit, that although it was so unfair, that although I, and the rest of the world, had been robbed of her beautiful life, and she had been robbed of living, maybe just maybe the last thing she felt was the warmth of my love and the beating of my heart, beating only for her.
Mother of All Things 