(no subject)
Keely would have been 21 days old today at 10:23 this morning had everything gone all right. We still don't have the autopsy results yet or the results from the genetic testing. The funeral was as beautiful as it can get for a baby who everyone had loved and had hopes and dreams for. I cried so hard to see her little pink urn. Those hopes and dreams is what I understand makes the death of a child, an infant especially, so hard. It's never easy losing anyone. I won't take that from anyone who's experienced the loss of a loved one, it's tough. Yet the people who have lost someone they've known for years can take some comfort in memories they've had with that person and are able to remember what they were like. There are memories. With a stillborn baby there are no memories, just the hopes and dreams of everyone who loved the baby. It's those hopes and dreams that make the death of an infant so lonely, maybe the loneliest thing to go through in the world simply because everyone's hopes and dreams are different from another's. Everyone has their own concept of what the little baby will bring to life and what he or she will grow to be, whose personality they will reflect the most. I never got to feel Keely's hand wrap around my finger, hear if her cry was like a little kitten's or a lamb's, never got to make her smile. Everyone grieves a baby so differently. You know everyone is hurting but no one feels what you do. It's so different for each person. My parents mourn for a granddaughter, my sister mourns for her first baby who looked so much like her, my brother mourns as an uncle, my oldest sister mourns as an aunt, yes, but as the aunt who was in the delivery room and helped coach my sister to deliver a dead baby when she wanted to give up. I don't want people telling me it's going to be ok, that she can always have another. I know things are ok. Keely is ok. And yes, she may have another child but baby #2 doesn't replace baby #1, there will always be sadness. Pregnancy isn't a miracle, childbirth isn't a miracle. Having a live, healthy baby is the true miracle because pregnancy and labour are dangerous and fragile, more fragile than life. Pregnancy isn't the same for me anymore. Nothing is. Not baby clothes, seeing sweet little children with their parents, not the smell of a fresh pack of diapers. It all either brings sadness, worry, or anger. I feel anger when I see a baby that's smaller at a month old than Keely was at premature birth and know that that baby survived. I had to walk away from a mother in the store one day because of it. I also had to walk away from the grandmother who found no joy in shopping for her brand new granddaughter who was born around the same day at Keely. I wanted to tell her off. I think about gutting out the nursery for Deanne while she was in the hospital. I did it with my oldest sister, putting away things she'd been given just 5 days before at the shower. It's all sitting in tote boxes in my brother's basement. Diapers and wipes have been returned to stores. I miss my niece. All my family has of her is her ashes, the package the nurses gave my sister with her hat, blanket, footprint and hair clipping; and eight pictures I took. We still don't have the hospital pictures. Eight pictures is all I can give. A scrapbook with pages removed for my sister because there weren't enough photos to fill it, even with just one on each page is all I have left to make for her. I know so many of my family and friends grieve for Keely but it's still the loneliest thing ever. Aunt Daph loves you, Keely.