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I read a friend's post about losing a baby to miscarriage at ten weeks. Her love for the baby she barely knew surmounted what some would imagine, and others might try to comfort away ("thankfully you already have three children . . . "). It brought to mind my daughter's best friend, who learned early in her pregnancy that the infant inside her had anencephaly, the cephalic disorder that prevents the brain developing. There is nothing anyone can do to help the baby survive once she's born, and they usually do go full term, depending on the mother for survival. Lesley's friend named her daughter, carried her in her womb the rest of the months to term, loved her, gave birth with her husband touching her wherever he could, and they held their daughter for a couple of hours until she passed away. I believe that it is possible to distill a full lifetime's love into a short span like that. What is time?
You've probably read about the sixteen-year-old boy who shot the final basket to win the varsity basketball game in Fennville, Michigan, and just after he was carried on the shoulders of his teammates and the crowd surrounded him with hysteria, suddenly, he paled, collapsed. And he died. Fennville is the high school where my siblings and I would have attended if my parents hadn't moved to a different town an hour and a half away shortly before I entered the world. My sister's granddaughter is student teaching in Fennville this year. Wes was in her school, where stunningly, with one missed heartbeat, he won't be Monday morning. We are throwing her a bridal shower tomorrow, for she is marrying a nice fellow named Jeff in May. Tomorrow in our celebration with Katy toward her new life with Jeff, we will also carry the weight of this too-soon-gone sixteen-year-old.
I think we are all mothers at times like this. Whatever our gender or childbearing ability, we carry the weight of a child, as Anne Michaels said in her powerful novel, Fugitive Pieces:
"There's a moment when love makes you believe in death for the first time. You recognize the one whose loss, even contemplated, you'll carry forever, like a sleeping child. All grief, anyone's grief...is the weight of a sleeping child."
Sometimes love itself feels this way. Love is almost a grief in its timelessness, ever constrained by the weight of gravity and distance. Even the separation of skin is is almost too much to bear.
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