The One Who Died

It’s almost like I’m a ghost.

In a way part of me is. Part of me died.

She’ll never come back.

But her memories, hopes, dreams, desires, urges, fears, history… linger.

And some days I feel like I am drowning. Not under water, not under pressure. In nothingness. In air. In space. In time.

It’s like I’m still here, invisible.

As if there’s the imprint of the one who died in everyone’s life, and she takes the place of the one who lives “out there,” in the world everyone else resides in. Meanwhile I’m here. Sitting in the chair making sure I’m quiet enough that she won’t wake as I finally got her down. The walls are all primer white from when we moved in. Nothing on the walls yet because we plan to paint. Some day. Everything outside of caring for her takes a back seat these days. It adds to the sense of some never-ending waiting room. Waiting for the next moment I’m needed.

Silence has become standard. I hear pitches inside the silence it’s so pronounced in my life.

I became someone new when I became a mother and while navigating the strangeness and ungroundedness of it all I am simultaneously intensely needed and wholly responsible for vulnerable, helpless, precious life.

I love being her mom. It’s just that currently that is the only part of me who feels alive. So when little bebe is asleep or in someone else’s care, when there are no baby dishes and there is no baby laundry, I become no one.

The one who died wasn’t spaced/pushed out. It simply became impossible for her to exist anymore. The one who was never a mother, who never became one. The one who never felt the ambivalence and utter confusion of finding out she’s pregnant when she was told years ago it was impossible. The one who never took the giant leap into the unknown, the one who never had to answer infinite questions with only the intuition of her body. The one who never got to feel when a soul chose her, and Danny, who never felt that soul fly through her heart and into her womb at lightning speed. The one who never committed to a love rooted in honesty and peace, who never realized just how much work that would take. The one who was never asked to open her heart more than its ever been to make room for a connection that will fill every crevice but take away from nothing. The one who never saw reflected in her own experience the experience of her parents, who never finally concluded that they were incapable of receiving the power INFINITE LOVE choosing to become a parent offers us all. The one who didn’t live in a bed for her entire pregnancy. The one who never watched almost all her relationships dwindle to dust as it all felt like too much to maintain. The one who never grasped that all her mind/body/soul wanted was NOTHING to best prepare for the work ahead. The one who never ran out of patience with everything around her one night and screamed at the animals in such a way they all cowered and ran away. The one who never struggled to believe and embody the truth that she was worthy of family, that this could all work out even better than imagined.

I never got to say goodbye. There’s almost an entire year to prepare but it doesn’t feel like anything until the day. The days felt endless because pregnancy made me so tired, and all I wanted was to not feel, to not BE, pregnant anymore.

I was unwittingly wishing away sacred time with the person I had been, unconscious of the absolute truth that she was not long for this world.

So now I mourn in silent pockets of the morning. I unsuccessfully try to conjure her with my new body - we used to move gracefully through space, we used to run through Wyoming mountains, we used to have sex with urgent desire.

She is gone.

And I don’t know yet who is here.

I’m so exhausted. It feels like outside of motherhood there is nothing but empty.

The gift of emptiness though is there is much room to fill.

I knew the alleys, darkened street corners, closets under the stairs, and abandoned buildings of the one who died.

I do not yet have even the map of the one who’s come to life. It is written, life is filled in, moment to moment. I walk blind, like the fool. Nothing is known so there’s no way to feel. But I feel the not feeling so hard.

I see so many other people navigating the world, moving forward inside of their lives, and while intellectually I understand that is simultaneously happening in my existence all I feel is -

Frozen.

Like I’m being left behind in some parallel planet Earth. See but not touch.

I guess it makes me feel like maybe I never existed at all. Or like my presence, my being, didn’t matter enough to be missed. Anything I can offer is not so important or desired that there isn’t even a blip of disturbance with my leave.

Which is incredibly self-centered. The nature of all material form is that life goes on. All life is in entropy but there’s just SO MUCH OF IT it persists. Humans and the world adapt and move through. Thriving is the homeostatic state of everything, when not impeded, so of course one person disappearing out of some spaces of the world means, ultimately, absolutely nothing.

But still.

I can’t help but wonder if I, or if anything I ever did, made any kind of difference.

I imagine it did and it didn’t. Like all things.

And I feel like I am the only one who notices she is gone.