I opened my eyes and the sun was whispering through the blinds in our bedroom. Alex was already up and in the living room, and had kindly shut the door on his way out that morning.
Nearly the second I opened my eyes, I started crying. At first, it was a quiet cry. The kind that nobody knows is happening, but then it started to build.
I didn't mean to be loud, but somehow Alex heard me in the living room through a shut door. I cried and cried and cried as I looked at the urn that had sat on my nightstand for the past year. Alex came in and didn't say a word, but laid down with me and circled his body around mine. We just laid there for 20 minutes as I cried and couldn't say anything.
It hurt. It hurt to think about where we were a year ago. It hurt to think about how excited we had been that morning on our way to the hospital and how all I kept saying was how excited I was to meet her. How thankful I had been that Alex had made it home from Afghanistan. It hurt to have the images of her still heart flash in my mind without any prompting.
It hurt.
Alex laid with me for a while longer before he eventually got up and started putting on his scrubs to go to work.
"Are you going to be okay?" he asked me before he left.
"Yeah, it just is what it is," I told him. I had planned to spend the day writing and drinking decaf coffee at our dining table.
Little did I know that not 5 minutes after Alex had left, I would get a text from him.
"I didn't even make it to the first light before I started crying," he said.
The problem was, my phone was on silent from the night before and I didn't get the text. After a few minutes of me not answering, he ended up calling my work phone which was not on silent. I was little irked that somebody was calling me, but I went to look and see who it was.
When I answered, Alex asked me in his calm-but-upset voice, "Of all the day to not answer your phone, can we please communicate better today?"
At that point, I finally read his text.
"You don't have to go to work, Alex," I had assured him. Luckily, Alex works for an office where everyone knew us when we lost Kaitlyn, so there was no explanation needed. They would understand if he just didn't show up, and they would give us both the grace we needed to mourn our daughter.
"Just don't go," I urged him. "Come back home, we can go do things that will make the day pass."
"I just need to drive around," he told me. And that's what he did. For the next hour, Alex just drove.
After some time, I sent him a text just to check on him and make sure he was okay. He told me he was fine, but that he wanted to go get a haircut and he wanted to know if I would go with him. I met him in the front yard with no makeup and a sweatshirt on.
I watched at the barber shop as they cut his hair and the dark pieces fell on the floor. His hair is jet black and very thick, and as I stared absently at the pieces on the floor I was reminded of Kaitlyn's dark hair that the nurses had cut locks of and pasted on a piece of paper for us. They had done it with a glue stick and at some point the pieces had started to fall off. I had eventually dropped some mod podge over the ends so that it would stay on the paper better.
Sometimes when I was sad, I would get the paper out and run my fingers over that hair. Jet black and thick strands, stuck just below a stamp of her footprints. There was some poem on it that I didn't really care enough to memorize, and the nurses had made three copies of it with locks of hair on each of them.
They could have taken all of her hair and given it to me, and it wouldn't have been enough. She could have left the hospital with a buzz cut and it wouldn't have bothered me one bit. Because that's part of her story. Her hair was such a huge part of her story because I knew that she would come out practically with pigtails because of the heartburn I had suffered.
We didn't do much the rest of the afternoon. We just stayed with each other and didn't talk about it.
The one thing I had wanted to do was for Alex and I to take these Chinese lanterns I had found online out and send them off after it got dark. We had scoped out this park just up from our house that had a nice little pond on it, and in my head I envisioned the two of us lighting the lanterns and watching them float up above the water and their reflections fading over the water as they rose in the night.
Real life rarely happens the way you expect it to, so of course it was a bit windy that night and we struggled to get (and keep) the lanterns lit long enough to get them to rise. But the good news is that we got so tickled at the wind that we ended up laughing quite a bit as we attempted to release the lanterns.
The summer I had been pregnant with Kaitlyn, I listened to the radio quite a bit while I was driving around for work. There was one song that kept coming on that was by the band Phillip Phillips, and at first I hated it. I thought it was morbid. But like most things that I try to resist, after I had heard it about 15 times I decided that I really liked the beat and the lyrics weren't awful. So I use to sing it to Kaitlyn while we would drive around, and as the part where "like a drum" would play, I would pat on my belly to help her feel the beat (which was almost always recognized with a good hard rub on my rib cage by the top of her head).
As we watched the lanterns float off in the darkness, I couldn't help but have that song play in my head.
Gone, Gone, Gone
by Phillip Phillips
When life leaves you high and dry
I'll be at your door tonight
if you need help
if you need help
I'll shut down the city lights
I'll lie, cheat, I'll beg and bribe
to make you well
to make you well
When enemies are at your door
I'll carry you away from war
if you need help
if you need help
Your hope dangling by a string
I'll share in your suffering
to make you well
to make you well
Give me reason to believe
that you would do the same for me
And I would do it for you, for you
Baby, I'm not moving on
I'll love you long after you're gone
For you, for you
You will never sleep alone
I'll love you long after you go
And long after you're gone, gone, gone
When you fall like a statue
I'm gon' be there to catch
put you on your feet
you on your feet
And if your well is empty
not a thing will prevent me
tell me what you need,
what do you need?
I surrender honestly
You've always done the same for me
And I would do it for you, for you
Baby, I'm not moving on
I'll love you long after you're gone
for you, for you
You will never sleep alone
I'll love you long after you go
And long after you're gone, gone, gone
You're my backbone
You're my cornerstone
You're my crutch when my legs stop moving
You're my head start
You're my rugged heart
You're the pulse that I've always needed.
Like a drum, baby, don't stop beating
Like a drum, baby, don't stop beating
Like a drum, baby, don't stop beating
Like a drum, my heart never stops beating
For you, for you
Baby, I'm not moving on
I'll love you long after you're gone
for you, for you
You will never sleep alone
I'll love you long after you go.
And long after you're gone, gone, gone
Like a drum, baby, don't stop beating
Like a drum, baby, don't stop beating
Like a drum, baby, don't stop beating
Like a drum, my heart never stops beating for you.
And long after you're gone, gone, gone
I'll love you long after you're gone
gone
gone...
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