Two weeks ago I was at my midwife appointment finding out that Cora's life, and our time together, had ended. It has a dream-like quality to it even now. So much hope lost, so much expectation dashed, so much fear realized.
I see other mothers holding their babies and I try to imagine what it would be like to hold Cora, what it would be like to have both of my children here on earth with me. It's hard not to idealize it, but I will never complain about the challenge of having two kids if we do have another one in the future. I feel bad for sometimes being so nonchalant about my pregnancy with Cora. I feel bad for at first feeling sad that she was a little girl, and for wanting another boy so badly. Now I don't know if I'll ever have a little girl. T feels bad for not touching my tummy more to feel her wiggle and kick. I feel bad for thinking on the Monday before Cora died that I didn't deserve her. It's as though God answered that, NO, I didn't deserve her.
I felt that there were so many God-things about the timing of my pregnancy with Cora. She and M were going to be almost exactly three years apart. She was a little girl and I had just knitted a beautiful girl blanket that I never sold or gifted because I just liked it too much. After finding out Cora's gender at our 20-week ultrasound, I remember thinking that all along I had really been making that blanket for her without even realizing it. The color we had chosen over a year ago for the room that would be hers. The bird theme and how all the decorations were coming together so beautifully. Her Great Granny J's pink wool blanket. All of it really made me feel that God was so in this and was working out all the details in such a wonderful way.
I feel like I was tricked, made a fool of. C.S. Lewis describes it best in A Grief Observed. He writes in the wake of his wife's death from cancer:
"What chokes every prayer and every hope is the memory of all the prayers H. [his wife] and I offered and all the false hopes we had. Not hopes raised merely by our own wishful thinking, hopes encouraged, even forced upon us, by false diagnoses, by X-ray photographs, by strange remissions, by one temporary recovery that might have ranked as a miracle. Step by step we were 'led up the garden path.' Time after time, when He seemed most gracious He was really preparing the next torture."
That's exactly how I feel. Led up the garden path.
Right now the biggest thing I'm asking Jesus for is some restoration for our family. Restoration of what has been taken from us, and restoration in this life, here on earth. I'm asking Him to honor this loss, Cora's loss.
M.A. [our neighbors' baby girl] joined Cora in heaven on Wednesday, September 14, the day after Cora's burial. I smile through my tears as I picture these two precious girls together soaking in Jesus' perfect love and feeling safer and more content than any of us will ever feel on this busted-up earth. And yet, I still wish that both of these girls were here with us now.
