This post comes with a disclaimer. Sitting down to write right now, I don’t yet know what I’m going to say. I can pretty much guarantee that it’s not going to be very pretty. I was very hesitant to post about this at all, but lately I’ve been noticing that there are a lot of things in life that aren’t talked about, but should be. I think this might be one of them, but I’m honestly not sure.

Where to start? Our neighbors through the woods have two daughters, a couple of months apart in age from Elijah and Galen. They got pregnant again halfway through my last pregnancy. They were the ones that lent us the birth tub and she was the doula friend who came to help out during Màiri’s birth. I was still in the birth tub holding Màiri when I found out that the little one in her belly was a boy. A boy after two girls! And me holding our first little girl in my arms! It was just this incredible transcendent moment and I can honestly say that I was just as excited for them as I was for us.

When Màiri was five weeks old, the father showed up at my door. He was here to get the birth tub. Their baby had become tangled in his cord and died. They were planning on inducing labor that day. While he was here, the father asked for our prayers and this shawl is mine.

This was a very difficult project. My most over-whelming desire for them was and is utterly impossible. I kept having the strongest sensation that if we could somehow just go back, just a couple of weeks, somehow it must be possible to set it all right. He was perfectly healthy! There wasn’t a thing wrong with him! But no, no one can do that. In the end the best I could offer, to focus on, while I did this work, was that they would someday find peace and that in the meantime they would feel held by their families and the community.

I know that this is not my loss and that I don’t really have the right to grieve in the face of this family’s suffering. That it’s not about me. But this tragedy has had a profound impact on me. Not the least of which is that every time I feel frustrated by my hands being full, I stop to be extremely and deeply grateful that my hands are full. I’m sad for Màiri for loosing the little friend that she never knew. I’m sad that our friendship will be forever more strained because our very existence is painful. And many other things, that I’ve tried to chalk up to survivors guilt; our baby is here and theirs is not, but it’s something more then that.

During Màiri’s birth I felt keenly that we four were connected. Two mothers, two babies. And somehow in that space my heart and my mind aligned our little ones together. I’m hunted by the memory of that moment when the Mama was helping to settle me and my newborn babe on the futon, before we had even cut her cord, and I patted her tummy lovingly and with a smile said, “It’s your turn next.” And it was, but theirs was not the joyous occasion that we all assumed it would be.
I’ve wept frequently and fully for that baby and his mama. For their whole family, but the two of them in particular time and time again. For the lose of the babe that shares a name with one of my own boys, the same boy that he nearly shared a due date with, just seven years removed. That same child of ours who was born with the cord wrapped so tightly about his neck that we were faced with a moment of great dread and fear for his life. And I’m blow away time and time again by the randomness of it all.