Of Things Past.

by Alexa on October 15, 2009

This is my favorite picture of Ames.
It’s a strange favorite to have, I suppose. The pictures taken after his birth are hard to look at, but I have other ultrasound photos taken much further along, after 20 weeks. I have the requisite adorable profile shots, his tiny nose and chin visible, his arm in the air. I even have some in 3D, and some of him with his sister. But this one—taken just a bit less than two years ago, well before I knew he was Ames, before I knew he was a he—is the one I look at most often.

In case you can’t tell, it is a shot of his legs extended upward from the end of his little round body, as he flipped upside down and waggled them at us. I remember laughing when he did it, and hoping the sonographer had caught it on film. At all of my early ultrasounds, Ames was the ham, waving and wiggling obligingly while Simone did everything she could to avoid being photographed, and as a result I have nearly double the pictures of him. Hers are mostly blurry or overtly threatening, an angry skull face flashed once at the camera.

I’ll be honest. Though I would have been happy with two girls, I secretly hoped for a boy. And just before he died, had I been forced to choose, I would have said Ames was the baby to whom I felt the closest. He was the only one I could feel, you see. My Stampy, thumping away hard enough to make my maternity shirts shiver, though now I’ll never be entirely sure it was him after all. Within hours of hearing he had died, Simone took up every bit of space in my brain, and Ames never got back the part that had belonged to him, at least not all of it. It doesn’t seem fair, and I suppose it is a good thing that the dead can’t get their feelings hurt.

Today is the designated remembrance day for pregnancy and infant loss (it is also, or so I am told, Global Handwashing Day). The date gives me an excuse to write this post, but I could have written it yesterday, or tomorrow, just as easily. These remembrance days are for the people remembering only tangentially. Mostly they are to give the rememberers one day on which they aren’t the only ones remembering. They give someone whose baby died six months or six years ago an excuse to use that baby’s name in conversation, without feeling awkward, without the uncomfortable silences that otherwise follow. On an ordinary Thursday such a mention might make someone worry for your mental health, but on a designated remembrance day…well, I don’t mean to sound cynical. I did light my candle, after all.

It’s odd, but I think I miss Ames more this year than I did last. Maybe it’s because I am writing a difficult part of the book at the moment—not the part you’d think—and it is my job, lately, to slip into my discarded skin and remember what it felt like when it was still fresh. Or perhaps it is because my sister-in-law is weeks from delivering her naturally conceived boy/girl twins, and as happy as I am for her, it is impossible not to occasionally imagine myself in that skin, just for a second. It could be the fact that I am only five pounds from the weight I was when I delivered, and my mind is trying to rub it in by reminding me that what I have now accomplished with cheese, I originally attained only by growing two human babies.
Likely, though, that damn Kubler-Ross was right all along, and grief isn’t linear so much as it is a field of unexploded land mines punctuated by the occasional ankle-turning rabbit hole.
(I may be paraphrasing.)

Of Things Past.

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