Thursdays

I'm up again, crying. You see it is Thursday and on this Thursday last year I gave birth to my daughter. For some reason the day of the week has always been particularly hard. At first it was every Thrusday, than it was the last Thursday of each month. Now as her birthday approaches, where does my Thursday fit in?

This week has been filled with tears, multiple times a day. Late nights, no sleep, waking and crying. It is Summer here and our lavender colored crape mertle tree is in bloom once again. I remember last year watching as the tiny pink blossoms would flutter to the ground, thinking how it seemed fitting that it was the earth's form of pink baby tears. It is 12:30am and I went outside to sit and listen to our fountain, the mocking birds that don't know it's time for sleep and be out in the cool air. I had this urge to walk down the street in my nightgown, bare footed in the halfmoon light looking for my daughter. I still feel like I've lost her somewhere, she just needs to be found.

I was thinking about chimpanzees and how grieving mothers keep their dead babies with them...here is an excerpt from Science Now:
"In a second example of chimpanzee grieving, a research group led by Dora Biro, a zoologist at the University of Oxford in the U.K., observed two chimp mothers carrying the remains of their dead infants for weeks. The observations were made in the forests of Bossou, Guinea, where primatologists have been studying wild chimps for 3 decades. In 2003, an epidemic of respiratory disease broke out at Bossou, killing five chimps. Two were infants, 1-year-old Jimato and 2-year-old Veve. The mothers of the infants carried their dead bodies around on their backs for 68 and 19 days, respectively, even as they dried out and became mummified. They brushed flies away from the babies, groomed them regularly, and allowed other chimps—including other young animals—to poke at the bodies, lift their limbs, and even carry them around for short distances."

This makes TOTAL sense to me. Holding my daughter and kissing her soft skin and telling her how much I love her for that evening and half of the next day are all I will ever get to have. I remember knowing it was time to let her go...but I would have felt much better about taking her home with me and carrying her around. Once they are gone, it is forever. I will not be able to touch her, kiss her, stroke her soft pale skin, ever again.

When Kai and I meditate we say that all the sadness, madness and badness that we breathe out turns itno bright white sparkling light and goes out into the universe, leaving room inside of us for more love, peace and joy. I wish I could breathe all this sadness out but my breath feels stiffled and caught in my throat with a sob and short inhalations.

Grief is so convoluted, sometimes it is anger or physical pain, sometimes it is disbelief, sadness, despair, sometimes it is about trying to find hope as we muddle through the thickness of loss....but in the end it all comes back to love. I miss my daughter so much. I could say it a thousand times over but it does not seem to encompase the ache and longing that my soul feels. My tears seem hardly enough for the magnitude of loss. I love and so I am broken. I love and so I am sad. I will always love Camille with all of my heart and I just miss her so incredibly much.

And so it is Thursday. Was she dead already at this time? I didn't know until 3:00am that I couldn't feel movement. It had been 5 hours since I last felt her move, at 10pm before I went to sleep. I hope she felt my love. I hope somehow, in someway that she knew the extent of my love was and is beyond measure. I miss Camille with every fiber of my being and today, this Thursday morning., it is particularly present.