An evolution.

In the beginning, I felt everything.  All of the feelings, I felt them.  Disbelief, emptiness, anger, guilt, confusion, self-doubt, fear, what-ifs, and incredible, incredible sadness.  The sadness of losing her, and of feeling like I had somehow failed her when she needed me.  Sitting in the dead silence of our apartment with all of those feelings was too much to bear.  It was a relief when 6PM rolled around every day so that I could focus on making dinner and just going to sleep.

We did a lot to try to distract ourselves in those first few weeks.  Three weeks after Mila was born, we ran away to Japan.  Japan, in all its unfamiliarity, was frankly less foreign and terrifying than the new Mila-less San Francisco that we found ourselves in, which is full of parks where I planned to take her, shops where I had bought her 12-month clothes in anticipation of a lifetime together, and other parents pushing the same model of baby jogger we had gotten her.

We wanted to be lost in translation, to disappear for a while.  Japan felt like a friendly refuge.  The lights were bright and the food tasted good.  There was good running for D, who has been channeling his negative energy into long, long runs.  People smiled at us, and the sound of Japanese chatter was a cheerful background buzzing that didn’t intrude into my thoughts.  I liked the Shinto shrines, especially Fushimi Inari-taisha with its thousands of red torii gates winding up Mount Inari, which were contemplative and integrated into their natural surroundings.

I couldn't escape completely, even there.  I saw kawaii stuffed animals I wished I could take home for Mila.  At a drugstore in Kyoto I saw a basal thermometer, of all things.  At the bullet train station, a dark-haired, pink-cheeked baby girl, bundled up against the cold, giggled and smiled at me intently.  I smiled back at her for a minute before I had to turn away.

But it helped, even though we knew it wouldn’t actually help us “work through” our grief, whatever that means.

Getting the autopsy report and all of Mila’s genetic test results after we returned from Japan helped, too.  D warned me against reading the autopsy report, but there was never any question in my mind that I would.  I’m her mom; in good or in bad, I cannot turn away from her.  In a strange way, I almost liked reading it - ten solid pages all about her, written by someone who had taken the time to observe every detail of her.  And it confirmed that she was normal, and whatever happened was probably sudden and unpreventable.  That went a long way towards putting our guilt and what-ifs to rest.  We tired ourselves out on all our medical questions, and we’ve turned to our philosophical ones.

Six or seven weeks out, my mom told me she’d had a dream about Mila as a little crawling, laughing baby.  She told me that this was about the time that souls came to visit their loved ones before going on to be reborn.  I don’t and didn’t believe this, at least not in any literal sense - but nevertheless, I felt a little miffed that I hadn’t had any dreams about Mila.  That night, I went to bed and I did dream about her.  In it I was trying, unsuccessfully, to help her pass gas.  After a moment she cooed as if to say that she actually felt fine, so I turned her over and rubbed her back.  And she smiled.

These days the grief still feels heavy, but it also feels less complicated.  Now it’s mostly just the sadness, of missing her and wishing she were here.  In the first weeks, I couldn’t take any pleasure in the sushi that I had been looking forward to eating again, having free time felt wrong, and the first beer tasted like a transgression.  I didn’t want to be able to do all those things.  Nowadays, I eat sushi and undercooked eggs, I snowboard at Tahoe, I drink Hendrick's & tonics at Lion Pub with D and my friends and we laugh - and while it’s not what we thought we’d be doing, and I miss her intensely, I don’t feel like running away anymore.