Lonely Without Evie

Evie died in Vera’s arms on Wednesday afternoon. I’d been checking facebook incessantly, anticipating a post from Vera with an update as to how their case conference went. When I saw pictures of Valerie meeting her baby sister for the first and last time, of Evie going outside for the first and last time, I lost it. I felt devastated by the unfairness of it. For Vera to wait and study and anticipate and decorate a nursery and pump milk for three months only for her treatments to ultimately fail. I feel sick.

I wonder why I am so upset by this. Of course it’s horrible to lose your child, but I don’t know Evie or Vera. Not really. I had that fear (this is a theme now), that I hadn’t really dealt with the reality of Keira. Maybe I have this deep pit of despair that I haven’t realized yet. Maybe Evie has made my façade crack open and now I’m falling in. I was thinking about how I’d resisted praying for miracles for Keira, refusing to believe that her illness was a mistake. But now I found myself praying desperately for Evie. Willing her to fight and to live.

I expressed all this to Jeff. “Have I really not dealt with this yet? Do I have all this deep dark stuff that I’m avoiding?” Jeff (wise old sage that he is) asserted that he thinks I’m lonely. He thinks that the idea of Vera and Evie provided so much hope for me. Hope that there really was someone out there who was not so different than me, who would have a child not so different from mine. Someone who would understand. Maybe we would have checked in with each other throughout their lives. Maybe we’dhave eventually met. Maybe we would have established a fabulous group home situation for our girls and they would have been roommates when they were older…

Jeff was right. It’s lonely.

Last night I had this dream.  I was eating at a barbeque with some extended family. An aunt of mine had had a baby and I was playing with her, or trying to, in my lap. The baby was about as big as Keira, and limp as a rag doll. More limp than a rag doll, actually. She was so hard to hold that she kept slipping out of my hands. My aunt offhandedly mentioned that the baby had been found to be infected with “congenital cytomegalovirus” but she didn’t seem to think it mattered much and she wasn’t going to make any decisions, anyway, without her boyfriend, who was out of the picture indefinitely. At this point it was clear, in an impossibility that only exists in dreams, that though I was playing with the baby, she was still in utero. I began asserting that really, they should do something, that CMV was a big deal and that there were treatments to be done to minimize the damage of the disease…nobody was listening. In the dream I felt so upset and frustrated and helpless that I finally decided that I couldn’t stay there any longer. I got up and walked across the lawn toward the house, but I became dizzy and I couldn’t walk straight and I had tunnel vision. I finally collapsed onto the ground at the edge of the yard. Nobody came to help me.

It was then, that Keira woke me, thankfully, to nurse at 5am. She greeted me with a smile, ate peacefully, and went back to sleep. Just like babies do.