Sophie Marie and the Heavy Business

Today is a bones day, a guts day, a squeeze of my throat day. It’s been one year since my Sophie died. The same song is playing on the stereo. My crying tastes the same, tears and coffee and snot. The trees look the same but the knotweed is gone. Clem is sleeping in her carseat instead of in my womb. Josie and Desmond have lived one year without their mama. 

There is a certain head shake my aunt Marie does sometimes when we cry together. A press of her tongue against the roof of her mouth. The little sucking sound when it pulls away. It’s a “no.” This gesture of heart sagging, longing, heartbreak embodies a stunned unbearableness. We squint towards reality saying “really? This?”

We hold each other. We swim. We play with the children. 

To walk through my first year as a mother enmeshed with those who have lost a child has amplified the presence of the terror we choose to dance with by creating new life. Our own mortality no longer the center of our existential fear, the terrible risk of love first cries, then crawls, then walks into this world in the form of our children. 

Thank God they are so consuming so as to leave little room for that terror in most of our waking moments. There are very few empty spaces for fear to fill. Clementine’s becoming is too big. I am nursing or helping her climb the stairs or picking her up or putting her down or wiping things, so much wiping things. The thoughts come when I lie down to go to sleep. The only stillness where I can be reminded of what could happen to her because she’s a little animal, a human being.

And so again, huge acts of tenderness, en mass recipes for compassion, enormous kettles of love are called for to meet this specter of catastrophe. 

Can we make our love, not ourselves but our Love, equal to the heart rending we are in for? We must. Just as we fight our sense of powerlessness by flexing the muscles of will that contradict such paralysis, we look loss in the face, splotchy cheeks, briny tear tracks and all and say bring on the depths of love that make such loss possible to begin with. In the end we lose it all. Such is our mortal measure. Let’s make a real splash while we’re here folks. Sophie sure did.