My grief work

After reading Lea's lovely news about her new pregnancy and her thoughts about a second blog, I contemplated the possibility of starting a new blog to document Jurgen's journey. I only contemplated it briefly. I am unlikely ever to win an award for world's most prolific blogger as it is and I know that I would not be able to do either blog justice. So, with your permission, I will remain a solitary blog kinda girl for now.

This is Emma's place and I still intend it primarily to be about her and my journey since meeting her, kissing her and saying goodbye. There will be the occasional pregnancy post of course. The crazy triad of birth/death/maybe life that is pregnancy after loss (so powerfully articulated by Sally here) is an enormous part of my tangled, messy grief yarn right now. Parts of Emma's birth and death that I thought I had begun to process, begun to integrate suddenly loom very large again now.

I remember reading "Empty Cradle, Broken Heart" just a few days after Emma died and latching on with absolute fervour to the idea of "grief work". The idea that grief was something I could "do" something about, the possibility of clawing back some control in a situation where I lost every last vestige of controlling influence - that possibility was a heady and intoxicating one. It still is, although I think I possibly have a more nuanced idea of what it means now. I might be able to "do" grief but I cannot do away with with it.

I also remember reading a thread over on the pregnancy loss section of Mothering, not long after Emma died when my arms ached to hold a baby and getting pregnant again seemed the cure for all ills. There was a wise and gentle post written by a someone who was several years into this journey. She found herself unexpectedly and quickly pregnant again after the death of her precious firstborn daughter. She talked abut how she handled her still very raw grief alongside her hope of a different outcome for her second pregnancy. She talked of working on her first daughter's scrapbook & journal whilst all the time documenting her journey towards meeting her second little girl. It seemed to me then, and still seems to me now, a powerful and positive way to approach a new pregnancy and I have stored it away in my brain for a time like now.

I'm about to leave the first trimester and today I saw Jurgen again, doing headstands. I am being forced to believe (against my current inclination to preclude any optimism in case of a jinx) that at his moment in time, this pregnancy is progressing well. When I was expecting Emma, I started a cross stitch birth sampler for her. I didn't start it until I was 34 weeks as I was making one for her cousin first who was expected before she was. So Emma's was unfinished when she was born. I looked at it a few days after I arrived home from the hospital and had what might have been my first coherent thought of the aftermath. "I can't complete this now but if I ever have another pregnancy, this is my project to get me through". I have not touched it again but now I'm ready. Ready to document my daughter whilst I wait hopefully for her sibling. Like the cross stitch, this blog is a place to document her too, another place where I do my grief work.

I think there is still quite a lot to do.