Facebook

We had our babies service on Saturday and it is way to much for me to even begin to write about now. Today we posted the front of our babies memorial card on Facebook.  We talked about it and there are pros and cons.  There are two big positives for me.  First that more people will know of our beautiful babies including folks I see rarely and who don't know we lost them.  Second knowing others who've experienced similar losses was tremendously helpful to me and if our sharing can help others not feel so alone, I want to do that.  The negative possibilities include stupid comments, creating stress for pregnant women and being vulnerable (that one is a positive too).  In any case it's done.

Guests

And now it begins.  It's a little false to think of this as a beginning because we've been super focused on the service for some time now and since last Friday all of our time has gone to doing physical things to get ready - preparing the yard, buying and planting flowers, cleaning, killing aphids, cleaning.  7 am to 9 pm on Saturday, for example. But tonight at 6 pm R's dad and wife arrived, after a day long flight, for our babies' memorial service.  We have both taken Thursday and Friday off work to prepare.  And so it has begun.

R's dad is a retired pastor and is officiating the service, I have never seen him preach, this is an odd way to experience something that was a central part of R's life.  I am not religious, R is not either at this point in her life. R's dad has agreed to present the service we have written and we created a space for him to speak as a grandfather and to include religion if he would like.  R's dad's wife, S is reading a poem R's aunt wrote and there is a call and response poem as well as music. We are also speaking, we each wrote something and then spliced it together so it goes back and forth between us.  I have no idea how it will feel to stand up and speak our sorrow and love. I hope this goes well.

By this, I mean the service, having house guests for almost a week, surviving, all of it.

I wish I meant, I hope being parents goes well.  I wish this was a beginning not an ending.

The color blue: On naming the unnamable #MicroblogMondays

I heard a story on NPR documenting the history of the color blue, the short version is that it didn't exist because there was no name for it.  As evidence, a man never told his child about the color blue and apparently she couldn't see it either.  Aside from the ethics of experimenting on children, I wonder what other parts of our existence are not experienced as fully as they will be in the future because we don't have a word for them?  Might some part of my time with my babies be more deeply known if only I had the word for it?

Erratic Fingernails

I keep my fingernails short.  When they start to have any length to them they irritate me, I am constantly aware of them, touching the keyboard, brushing against my skin, getting dirty in the yard.  For the past several weeks I have been cutting one or two nails at a time - whichever ones are bothering me the most.  This is the first time in my life that I have ever not systematically cut all the nails on my left hand and then my right.  When I realized I had been doing it, I felt out of control--like I was making decisions without my knowledge.  It's such a small thing, fingernails, but it feels like everything.  Like the pattern that can be seen in this one series of events is the mirror for everything else in life.  Things are pretty hard today.  Irritation and heartbreak are everywhere.

The Service, planning

We'll be holding the service for our babies at the end of the month.  We have R's dad to officiate and as of today we have a friend - a really nice person who isn't a close friend - who will be playing live music.  We are slowly pulling together things we want to include, we found a really lovely service done by a Unitarian minister that we'd like to mimic in parts.   We have each written letters for the babies, mine needs to be reworked because it was written just days after we came home from the hospital and it is partially processing the sequence of events that we had experienced and I don't need to do that for the service.  I would like to include the part from the Velveteen Rabbit that talks about becoming real and how that is related to being well loved.  Other than that, I'm not sure.  I am really glad that we will have live music, it makes the service feel full to me even though it will be short and simple.  We are holding it in our back yard so hopefully it doesn't rain, if it does we'll have to rearrange our furniture and make due in our relatively small living room - which opens to our dining room to form a rectangular space.  We are only expecting a small number of people.  I wish our loved ones weren't spread out across the country, it would be so nice to have them present. I'd love to have a couple of my closest people read things.  We invited everyone to send anything they'd like present at the service which would then be put in the babies memorial books, we've already received two really beautiful poems.  

I do wish I was planning their baby shower instead.  My sweet babies.