If love could have saved you, you would have lived forever

It is a beautiful spring morning, a few hours before the sun will rise. It is cool, damp, the birds are beginning to sing sleepy songs, and you can, finally after an endless winter, smell the hopeful scent of flowers.

Every bit of me longs for sleep, for rest. But I have been driven out of bed by spawn-induced insomnia and thoughts of Harper.

I woke up drenched in sweat, our bedroom uncomfortably warm as the house adjusts to the new paradigm of spring and warmer weather. As the yoga teachers say, my mind was like a mad monkey, and rather than settling back down to sleep, I began to run through my mental to-do list.

And I thought about Harper's bushes.

We planted them on Mother's Day last year. They served as the backdrop of her memorial service, chosen in haste from a garden center because the blaze of pink azaleas reminded me of everything I wished my little girl could have had, every stereotypical girly urge that I didn't realize I had until I lost her.

They didn't survive the winter, unfortunately. And the failure of that stings me, makes me feel I have let Harper down once again.

But now, at 4 AM, I have become obsessed with replanting them. It doesn't matter to me that they're not the exact same bushes. I want that visible reminder, something I can point to for Shea and spawn to come to say "these help us remember our Harper bean."

And then I began thinking about benches. How nice it would be to have a little stone bench between them, So, it is now nearly 5 AM, and I have spent the past hour obsessively Googling stone memorial benches, because these are the sorts of irrational behaviors one engages in when awash in a sea of mourning and pregnancy hormones.

I haven't found the perfect bench. But I may have found the perfect sentiment to put on it, "If love could have saved you, you would have lived forever."

If only.

Shea cheerfully told our new neighbors today about Harper dying. We were on a family walk (or, in my case, waddle), and introduced ourselves to a recently moved in family, out doing yard work. Spring is like that; we suddenly encounter people we've not seen through the long, hibernating winter months.

After introducing Denver dog, Shea began the kind of monologue unique to small children, "We also had London girl, but she died. And baby Harper died, too. We had baby Harper, but she died."

He is rightfully proud that he remembers these things. That he gets his facts straight.

Sometimes I inadvertently confuse things for him. I've been struggling with constant headaches for the past couple of weeks, just one of the joys of late pregnancy. It finally got bad enough that I checked in with my doctor's office.

"Is this your first pregnancy?," asked the kind voice of the nurse.

"No," I told her, "It's my third."

"So, you have two kids?"

"No, I have one kid. We lost a child."

At this point, Shea, who had been eavesdropping near by, piped in, "No, you didn't, mommy. You didn't lost a child."

I  hushed him to finish the conversation, but when I hung up, he persisted. "But you said you lost a child and you didn't lose a child."

I explained to him how "lost" is another way to say someone has died, and in this case, I meant Harper bean. He didn't ask any more questions, but I wonder if that's what put the thought in his mind as he introduced himself to the new neighbors. Or maybe his brain is now wired to think Denver-London-death-baby Harper.

Soon, I will be up at this time nursing spawn. I suspect it'll be a lot harder to type and nurse at the same time, nor am I sure I would want to. It's different than the wee hours I spent pumping for Harper, hooked up to that awful machine, strategically placed pillow and laptop on my lap, trying to expunge my sorrow into a computer keyboard.

I don't know if this blog will survive the birth of spawn. If I will need the therapy of it anymore. Maybe that's OK.

The birds are chirping more loudly now.
Like the bushes, it will help me remember, make sure I don't forget.