I woke up this morning about an hour ahead of my alarm, the sky already light, birds calling. After a few minutes, a brief patter of rain swept across the roof and moved on.
I just lay there, not really thinking. Feeling. Remembering.
Almost sixteen years to the minute before I awoke, my second daughter was born. Almost ten years to the same minute before, she’d turned six years old, already semi-unconscious, and died not quite twelve hours later.
So she won’t be taking her first solo car drive today. She won’t be celebrating with dinner at her favorite restaurant in the whole world. She won’t kiss her niece good night or affectionately rag on her siblings.
Or maybe she wouldn’t have done any of those things anyway, after a decade of growth and changes and paths taken. What would she really be like, at sixteen?
We will never know. We can’t even guess. All of that, everything she might have been, is lost.
This afternoon, we’ll visit Rebecca’s grave, and then go to hear her name read in remembrance at one of her very happiest places, Anshe Chesed Fairmount Temple, for the last time. At the end of the month, the temple will close as part of a merger. Another loss.
A decade ago, I said that I felt the weight of all the years she would never have, and that they might crush me. Over time, I have come to realize all the things she never saw or did adds to that weight. Even though it seems like it should be the same weight. Somehow, it isn’t.
I was talking about all of this with a therapist a few days ago, about the time and the losses and their accumulated weight. I said, “I don’t know how to be okay when I failed my child in the most fundamental way possible.”
“You didn’t fail her,” they said gently.
“I know that,” I replied. “But I don’t feel it.”
A decade, it turns out, does not change that. I’m not sure now that any stretch of time ever could.
