running on tiptoe

i don't know the family, i didn't know the baby. ernie works with her father, this is all that i know of them. they didn't expect her to live to be older than ten, but dying at three was still unexpected. can a mama ever expect her baby to die? and seven more years of life has to seem like a century compared to the last few minutes of breath.

i tried not to think too much about it, stopping to whisper a prayer for their family here and there throughout the day seemed enough. i didn't want to look at my own three year old and all of is glow and spark and put myself in hannah's mama's funeral shoes. but i thought about them a lot, about the crater of emptiness that would bore through my chest, through the chambers of my heart, were my own child to experience death before i do.



i thought about the quietness of their house, the empty feeling the rooms have when something isn't right, isn't the same. i thought about how weird dead people look, weirdest most to those who knew them best, and how utterly terrible it must feel to see your child looking that way. i thought about how people never know what to say to those who experience this kind of loss, at least how i never know what to say, how i avoid having to say anything at all because i am not brave enough to shoulder some of their pain and grieve with them.

henry snoozes upstairs, a late afternoon nap for a boy who is fighting a cold. jude snores alongside him, one arm over his head, just like ernie sleeps. i stare at them long and hard before i walk downstairs to make a congratulatory "welcome to the world" call to my sister-in-law who has recently given birth to a baby girl.



i take my children for granted, i realize yet again. their liveliness, their tenacity, their persistance, their independance, their dependance. i find myself often annoyed by the very things that make them living people. it's ridiculous to promise against the repetition of being annoyed so, but if it were possible, i'd do it in a flash. it's all too short, these minutes we're given, to be taking them for granted the way that i do.