Meredith Miller

There’s a darkness, which comes without a warning

But I will sing you lullabies and wake you in the morning.  -Come to Me, Les Mis

We’ve gone back and forth–it is ‘harder’ to have been the pregnant one, physically experiencing losing our girls, like you sometimes say?  Or is it harder to be in your shoes, having emotions and memories but not quite such a tangible experience?  Harder to be the one people swarm because it’s awful when a momma loses her babies, or harder to the one people stop asking about, not because they’re bad people, but because we forget?

In the end, we found a way to stop feeling guilty about how it must to so much harder for you and less hard for me.

We cried.

And just sat.

And found that so much meaning could be packed into small phrases, so that now, one of us can ask, “What’s wrong?” and the other can say, “Just sad,” and not need to dive into whatever piece of the grief they are specifically feeling right then unless they want to.

Lots of wives probably feel like their kids got the best dad ever.  And they even get to see them parenting when they feel it.

Instead, I see the spot on our rug where you doubled over because walking into our house that Sunday night sucked the air out of you.  I hear your sobs, see you press your palms to your eyeballs as if that would stop some part of the pain.

I’m so sorry that you don’t get to hold babies on your first Father’s Day.  But our girls are more than fine, and we’ll see them in the morning.