There will never be another one like you

We approach four months. My grief is turning. At first there was absence, an appreciation of the present with Mia, a relief at the end of Sasha's suffering, a desire to enjoy the difference, to meet with friends. There was also desire to open the book on questions left unasked.

So I channelled my energy toward meeting with Sick Kids and learning about foundations to see how we could help or perhaps to mark the lessons Sasha held for us and others. It was a time of questions.

In fact the last few weeks have been so busy I forgot to go to two palliative care events I was looking forward to and was honoured to be included in.

Now my sense of loss and sadness deepens. Before bed I cannot get Sasha out of my mind, some nights it is hard to fall asleep. And yet I do not dream of her. I wonder why. My dreams are wierd, not sure I would want little Sash dealing with the characters in my dreamworld.

The other night I went to bed early and rose around 5am. I love to see the sun rise as I read or write or reflect and enjoy the quiet as the night turns to day. Approaching 8am I laid beside Pamela and enjoyed that special smell of a beautiful woman at rest.

My eye was caught by the bars of blue sky through the slats of the blinds. And then I saw Sasha's arm. She was all there in my mind's eye but my mind chose to bring me her golden arm and then move me to the white scars set off against the yellow flesh of her chest.

And it hit me like never before, I will never know such a girl as Sasha ever again. And I cannot shake that feeling. Perhaps the last four months have been too filled with busyness to really feel.
We cannot shake the feeling that we let her down, that we could have tracked down her bleeding in the summer before the surgery or brought her home earlier after the surgery. Everyone means well when they say we did all we could and that you cannot make a wrong decision out of love. Unfortunately we have to deal with our own regrets in our own time.

For the first time tonight I had just a momentary flash when I imagined what it must have been like for her to be stuck in the hospital for 5 months, too young to ask us why we had left our lovely home with our lovely dog on our lovely street.

I am so happy we came home, but it could have happened months earlier. We were not ready. We were so caught in the day to day. The hope. Ah, that hope.

How many of the doctors and nurses knew how it would end? Many of them would say, You never know.

All those days we waited patiently for rounds to listen to every word and ask every question we could think about. Now we wish we went home earlier on TPN. We were scared to go home.

Two years of Sasha sleeping one, two, maybe three hours at a time and five months at Sick Kids conditioned me deeply. Friends used to say, You must be under such stress. People can adapt to amazing things. Now this conditioning washes away and I can feel more and often it just doesnt feel good at all.

Yet life has an amazing way of swinging. Today we went to see tombstones at Benjamin's. We needed to change Mia's diaper and I pictured hands and eyes raised as we cleaned her bum in the main hall surrounded by tombstones and pictures of graves. But Michael Levitt kindly offered us his table (we lay Mia on a blanket on the floor instead) and it was no biggie.

He was younger than we expected and I was surprised when he told he was born in Scotland. His accent rose as we had spoken and suddenly it hit me he had an accent. So we reminisced about the wonders of the Scottish land.

Then we looked at the stones and talked about the designs and wording it was a light banter. Not heavy at all. And then we taked about would there be some Hebrew words. And thinking of what words I would want to say in Hebrew brought tears to my eyes.

It is almost knee jerk how tradition can serve as a sluice to emotion.

So it goes, alternatively psychically battened down and opening up, and feeling that intimate knowledge that my little girl is gone and no amount of good deeds will give me one more live moment with her.