The Lonely Vilomah

Love, loss, grief, and picking up the pieces.

Recent Posts

  • The Invisible Side of My Motherhood

    That feeling of missing Maria has been with me a lot lately. Today, it happened during our family vacation, when we went to see a dolphin show.

    It seems to happen the most during peaceful family moments. Moments when I feel like I’m doing well as a mom. Moments when the kids are happy, when we’re out and about, and when we’re actively spending time together as a family. 

    Today was a hot, humid summer day. And as I held my youngest, my living daughter, and watched the dolphins play just beneath the surface of the water, I felt the whisper of a cool breeze against my cheek, and I felt Maria’s presence as certainly as if she had been standing there next to me. It was like she had just come running over to see the dolphins with us.

    It always makes me imagine what she would be like now. But in the moment, it’s also less of an imagining, and more of an experiencing. I felt her moving through the water, and through the air. I felt her emotions, her playfulness. I felt a vastness, and a comfort, and a deep longing, all at once. 

    The joy and comfort I felt in that moment were such a stark contrast to her actual earthly life. Not even a heartbeat later, I felt the sorrow of her loss. I still wish I understood why she had to be so sick, and why she had to go so soon. Why she couldn’t have had a normal life with us, with her family. 

    I wonder if anyone else there at that dolphin show felt her presence the way I did. If they did, I wonder if they knew what they were feeling. If they did not…maybe that’s the special gift of being her mother. Something only I get to experience. 

    This is also the invisible side of my motherhood.

    While losing her was one of the worst experiences I have ever had, being her mother was one of the best. Is one of the best. In this motherhood journey I have been forced to learn how to hold space for both joy and sorrow. I have had to learn to simultaneously parent my earthside children alongside the child I cannot touch or see.

  • Missed Milestones – Starting Kindergarten

    I have written before about missed milestones. They are tough, and I expect they will continue to be tough moving forward as well. This year, right around now, Maria would be five years old and headed off to start kindergarten.

    Kindergarten is a big milestone, representing the beginning of a beautiful new chapter in life. Social media posts abound; children in carefully selected outfits, with shiny new school supplies and backpacks, holding signs declaring their age, and that it is their first day of kindergarten. So much excitement! The occasion is centered around both joy for what the future may hold, and a beautiful nostalgia for the time spent together thus far.

    I want to be happy for them, I really do. But it’s still honestly hard to feel anything other than grief, still tinged with anger. The grief and anger are not directed outward; it’s not that I’m angry at the families celebrating this milestone with their living children. It’s that I’m angry that Maria doesn’t get the same opportunity, and that our family doesn’t get the same opportunity to celebrate her, and to celebrate with her. It hurts to know that instead of beautiful nostalgia for time already spent together growing and learning, we experienced grief, sickness, and death. I like to believe that she understood how loved she was, and so she also had the experience of being loved. But it’s not the same as the typical ups and downs of time spent with family while healthy and thriving.

    People forget that with Maria’s diagnosis, we also lost this potential for a whole and beautiful life. For 18 weeks of my pregnancy, we were preparing for a healthy addition to our family, and all of the milestones likely to accompany that. If I allow it, this recollection is enough to bring me back to an earlier, rawer and more consuming version of my grief, even five years later. Why did she have to be so sick? Why did she have to die? Why couldn’t she have had even the most basic version of life that millions of others seem to get to enjoy?

    Sometimes I do see her, when I allow myself to enter that parallel universe where she exists. Where our family is whole. She has thick, brown curly hair that lands right around her shoulders. She often wears t-shirt dresses with soft, colorful leggings. Happy, bright or pastel colors, never dark. The joyful colors of youth, vibrant and alive. I imagine her bright and inquisitive, and a little bit shy. Similar to our living daughter in her love of animals, but with a quieter and more reserved presence.  

    She would be the first of our children to start school, bravely departing into the unknown. Ready to learn, and to play, and to grow.

    In another universe, in another life, where we celebrate all the milestones.

  • Diagnosis Anniversary Reflections – Year 6

    I continue to be surprised by the signs of recognition ingrained deep within my body as I experience these significant anniversaries. With my daughter, there are significant anniversaries all year round. We received her diagnosis in August. Then soon after came the start of the holidays, experienced through the shadows of anticipatory grief. Shortly after New Year’s, she was born. We transitioned home from the NICU, and she entered into hospice care. In March, we shifted to comfort care. In April, she died. In May, we buried her. And then, afterwards…the darkness. The memory of those first putrid summer months after her passing is seared into my bones. Which brings me back to August, and the anniversary of her diagnosis.

    This year, the memories of this particular anniversary lurked mostly beneath my subconscious. I didn’t recognize until days later that the terrible, sleep-disturbed night I had that bled into a restless and immensely long workday may have been related to my body’s recollection of that terrible anniversary. Because sleep escaped me, I started work earlier than normal, and then I ended up leaving work earlier than normal, having dinner, and crawling in to bed immediately afterwards. Physically, I felt awful. Emotionally, I somehow didn’t see the correlation with her diagnosis anniversary until afterwards.

    It’s interesting; the physical manifestations of grief for me were much more present and overwhelming during those first early months after her death, and even still during those first few years. Now, I am finding myself more easily distracted by the usual stressors of daily life (work, caregiving, household chores, and other family responsibilities), and sometimes those relatively mundane stressors compound and build off each other, resulting in my body’s undeniable and urgent need for rest. But that undercurrent of grief is always present, and I have found that lately, it tends to surge more on already difficult days. This year may be the first year I have had any question about it: did the stress cause my bad day and my surge of grief, or did the anniversary and surge of grief cause my bad day and stress? I expect maybe it was a bit of both.

    This year is also one of the first years I feel like I’m actually kind of looking forward to the fall months again. Fall used to be one of my favorite times of year, but after my daughter’s diagnosis, fall lost its luster. I started seeing everything in shades of gray, as opposed to the bright, crisp, beautiful colors of fall. For the past few years, the cooling temperatures and changing leaves only served as a catalyst to bring me physically back in time to the loneliness, anticipatory grief, uncertainty, and isolation that followed her diagnosis. I guess it has taken six years for this to begin to soften in any real and lasting way. I’m grateful to have found some of my love of the season again. I also struggle a bit with this softening. I haven’t forgotten her, and I never will. But allowing for that joy, and that excitement, sometimes feels almost too close to forgetting. I have to remind myself that joy and sorrow can (and shall forevermore) coexist in my life. I can feel the grief, and honor the grief, and honor my daughter’s memory, while still leaving room for joy.

  • Losing a Pet After Infant Loss

    (Written August 24, 2026)

    We lost our beloved cat yesterday.

    I think it must have been related to old age; we’re actually not sure how old he was. When we rescued him from the shelter eleven years ago, they thought he was around three years old, but they weren’t completely sure.

    Nobody else was home with me when he died (besides one of our living children, who was napping in the next room). I was able to comfort him in his final moments.

    Losing a pet is a devastating loss. My experience losing my beloved cat after having also lost my infant daughter felt even more complicated. I found myself repeatedly (and involuntarily) comparing both experiences. The memories of my daughter’s death as I compared both losses were very visual; it was like I had gone back in time to when those kind of flashbacks of my daughter were much more frequent and intense. I didn’t want to compare the two losses in that way, over and over again… it was just where my mind had to go. It was like my mind was trying to understand, to put everything in the order it was supposed to be in.

    In addition to the flashbacks, I kept expecting to see our cat everywhere as I moved around the house. When he was alive, he was everywhere. Always underfoot. He was more like a dog than a cat, honestly. Incredibly social, and very much a lap cat. He had an incredible personality. The constant jarring reminders that he was unexpectedly gone as I moved throughout our home, coupled with the flashbacks of both his and my daughter’s deaths, made my usual evening routine tough to endure.

    It happened late on a Sunday afternoon, so I asked for the next day off of work. I was a little worried that it would be viewed as an overreaction, but my grief is complex, and I wanted to make space for it in case I ended up needing it. (It’s Monday as I write this—I am so glad I did.)

    My daughter’s death was not unexpected. It happened gradually over the course of many months. With our cat, it came completely out of nowhere. We knew he was older, but he seemed perfectly healthy. I thought we had a few more years left with him. And then, in an instant, he was gone. I’m still reeling a bit from the shock of it.

    But I also have some things to fall back on now, to try to derive some comfort from, that I didn’t have with our daughter. With our cat, he had a long and happy life. With our daughter, she did not. I have many happy memories with our cat, and he had many, many happy moments throughout his life. It doesn’t fix the loss, and it doesn’t take away the grief, but it softens it a bit.

    He was also “just a cat,” of course, but I loved him. He was a part of our family. And his death brought surging forward the complicated emotions and grief that are always swimming just beneath the surface for me, as I continue integrating my grief over the loss of my daughter into my life.

  • Did I Choose My Grief?

    By choosing to carry, did I choose my grief?

    I have thought about this question often during the past few years. By choosing to carry my daughter to full term despite her immensely poor prognosis, did I choose the anticipatory grief that accompanied the final five months of my pregnancy? Did I choose the grief I experienced while caring for her during her life, and after her death? The grief I am still experiencing now? While I did choose one path over the other, I believe that either path—choosing to carry, or choosing to terminate for medical reasons (TFMR)—would have led to significant, life-altering grief.

    I actually think that one of the things I didn’t have a choice about was the fact that there would be grief. No matter what, when we received that diagnosis, there could be no path forward without grief. There could be no path forward without loss. Because with that diagnosis, we lost the future we had been imagining for our daughter, and for our family. We lost the relationship we expected to have, and the milestones we expected to celebrate. We lost our innocence—our belief and our trust that if we did all the right things, that everything would turn out ok. We ultimately lost her too; either choice would have led to losing her.

    If there could be no path forward without loss, without grief, then other questions logically follow. Did I choose the path with more significant, damaging grief? Would I have “recovered” more quickly if I had chosen the other path? Would it have been easier to process, and easier to integrate that grief and loss experience into my life moving forward? I think these questions are probably impossible to truly answer. Just like it is impossible to compare two different types of out-of-order losses, or even to compare when two different people experience the same type of out-of-order loss. Everyone is different, everyone experiences life differently, and furthermore, there will always be variables across situations that are different, even if the situations themselves are similar. How can I really compare what my grief journey and motherhood experiences would be like as a result of one choice versus the other? How can I really compare them, really know them, without actually living both paths?

    So no, I don’t believe that I chose my grief, at least not in the sense that it would have been less severe somehow if I had chosen TFMR instead of choosing to carry to term. I would still have experienced grief if I hadn’t chosen to carry, it would have just resulted from a different loss experience. It would still be a life-altering, devastating, painful grief. Loss itself is a universal human experience, and the combination of love and loss equates to grief. Grief is the price of love, and of loss. It is unavoidable in general, and it was unavoidable for us.

    I did make a choice, however, and I think there are other, more important (and related) questions. Did I choose the right path for my daughter? For me? For my family? Did I make the best decisions I could with the information I had available every step of the way? Was I the best mother I could be for her? Am I still the best mother I can be for her? Because after all, I am still her mother. I will always be her mother.

    The one thing I have never questioned was the fact that I made the best decisions I could every step of the way with the information I had available. That didn’t mean it was easy, but that knowledge helped carry me through. And ultimately, it is that knowledge that has continued helping me move forward.

  • Death Anniversary Reflections – Year 5

    (Written April 11, 2026)

    I was recently asked about my grieving process as it relates to the current time period I find myself in: specifically, the time between Maria’s birth and death anniversaries. We are quickly approaching the fifth anniversary of her death. I realized as I reflected on how my grief has shifted (due to both time and effort), that Maria’s birthdays are days I dedicate to thinking about her, but her death days are the days I dedicate to thinking about myself.

    Here’s what I mean by that… I think about myself as her mother, both then and now. I think about whether or not I was, or am, a good mother to her. I think about how I’m living my life, and if I am honoring her as well as I should be in the way I’m living it. I think about whether my life is aligned with my values, even though I’m honestly still trying to figure out what those look like now. I know I value peace, and authenticity. I value kindness and compassion and empathy. I value commitment. I value responsibility and personal accountability.

    I live in a world that has essentially forgotten her. Most of my friends have grown tired of hearing about her, and about how her loss is still impacting me. My family is empathetic and understanding, but they just don’t live in the same grief space that I do. I’m her mother. I will always be her mother. Her absence will never be natural or ok to me.

    I often feel like I’m not doing enough. Not enough to honor her, not enough to take care of myself, not enough to take care of those around me. Not enough at work, not enough at home. My capacity for what I can handle has gotten smaller since some of that space became (permanently?) occupied by grief. But at the same time, I am astounded at what I can handle. I can remember things again. I can focus again, most days, for hours at a time. I can compartmentalize and multi-task in a way that I couldn’t right after Maria died. I can be truly empathetic to others about their challenges with their own healthy, living children. I can be truly empathetic to others about their non-loss-oriented challenges.

    (Written June 21, 2026)

    I realized today, as I tried to celebrate Father’s Day with my family, that I haven’t been truly happy since before Maria’s diagnosis. And that maybe I will never be again.

    What does it mean to be “truly happy?” To me, in this context, I think it means feeling content. Feeling like there is a greater order to it all, and that things will generally work out ok. Being able to be completely present with joy in a given moment. Sometimes I get glimpses of this, but other times it feels completely unattainable. I just don’t know if these things are achievable in a real and lasting way anymore, and I think that’s ok. I am a living contradiction now; I think I will always have to be able to hold space for both joy and sorrow.

    This blog post started out as reflections on Maria’s death anniversary; the anniversary came and went with surprisingly little emotional fanfare this year. I used my busy job as a distraction in the days leading up to it, and I was able to take some moments to myself on the actual anniversary date itself (which fell on a weekend this year).

    If nothing else, here is where I currently sit: I am still changed. I am still figuring things out. I am still, in many ways, spiritually numb (a topic to explore in greater detail another time). I am more isolated than I used to be, mostly because I am more selective in how I choose to expend my energy. I have greater capacity for joy, despite (because of?) my experiences with profound sorrow and loss. I make the time to sit with grief as often as I need to. I stand up for myself more, when I used to remain silent. I am Maria’s mother, and I always will be. And I will always try to make her proud in everything I do with the life I have left.

  • The Beach House

    (Written June 4, 2022)

    Every year since I was eleven, I have gone to the same beach house with my grandparents, parents, and extended family. We would spend a full week together, laughing and sharing, reading on the shore, and swimming in the sea. We found our favorite restaurants and went back year after year. The beach house was a sanctuary for me, a constant in an otherwise ever-changing life. As I grew older, I began to dream of what it would be like to bring my own children to our small slice of beach-side paradise.

    My grandparents both passed away within a year of my daughter’s diagnosis. My grandfather never saw me become pregnant. My grandmother never knew my daughter was sick.

    Shortly after my daughter died, I went back to the beach house with my immediate family.  Still recovering from our fear of COVID, we went alone, just the four of us. No aunts, no uncles, no cousins. Everywhere I looked, though, I saw my daughter. I saw where she should have been. I saw her in the empty bedroom we would have shared, in the sand on the beach where we would have played, in the soft ends of the waves lapping along the shore.

    In my dreams, we flood the beach house, all of us, together, with joy and love. My baby girl is healthy, happy, alive. She sees the wonder in the sand, the sky, the sea. My grandparents take turns holding her.

    I wish they could hold her here, with me, instead of in heaven.

  • Missed Milestones

    (Written May 31, 2025)

    Every once in a while, missed milestones still catch me off guard. It has been over four years since we lost our daughter Maria. Right after she died, reminders of her missed milestones were everywhere. She would never take her first steps, or grow out of her newborn onesies, or eat solid foods. She would never walk, run, or ride a bike. She would never dress herself. She would never have a favorite color or a favorite toy. She would never celebrate a birthday or a holiday. I would imagine her missed milestones as if she were healthy; all of the things her peers were doing that she would never get to do.

    Now that some time has passed, I think about these things a little bit less often. But we are approaching the time when she would be getting ready to start kindergarten, and so I think my grief is surging a bit around this topic. I saw an unexpected photo of a friend’s child’s “preschool graduation” yesterday, and my initial reaction was a mixture of sorrow and anger. Really, the anger came first. My first thought was, “Why is this even important?” Everyone “graduates from preschool” when they reach a certain age, whether or not they have achieved anything.

    It took some time and introspection for me to realize that the thing that I was upset about had nothing to do with this child, or with how this milestone was being celebrated. It had everything to do with Maria, and how she would never be celebrated in the same way. It felt like another example of the world moving on without her; one that I hadn’t expected in that moment, which made it even harder to witness. I’ll never have the chance to celebrate Maria’s life, even those “ordinary” moments or milestones that simply mark the passage of time. And there’s no reason for that loss. She wasn’t born healthy, and we don’t know why. We did everything right. She did everything right too.

    If Maria had been alive and healthy, we would be celebrating her preschool graduation too.

    It makes me wonder how long these missed milestones will be this difficult. I’m afraid it will be life-long. How will it feel to watch children Maria’s age (the age she would have been if she had lived) graduate from high school? Go off to college? Get married? Have children of their own? I will feel grief for the loss of the celebrations our family should be experiencing, and I will feel grief for what Maria lost too. She missed out on so much in this life. She missed out on just about everything.

    It also makes me wonder how many of us go through life carrying these kinds of invisible burdens. I really don’t feel like it is socially acceptable for me to talk about this aspect of my grief with my friends and family anymore, especially with my friends who are celebrating these milestones. Maybe I’m wrong, and maybe they’d be understanding. But for how long? How many years before their memory of Maria is so distant that it becomes unwelcome for me to talk about it? I don’t want to overshadow every good moment with, “But remember how sad it is that my daughter didn’t get to do this?” At the same time, it’s how I feel. And it’s my burden to carry. I never asked for it, but it’s mine.

    For these reasons, I often turn to writing. I turn to this blog, or to my private journal. Keeping the grief entirely trapped inside feels like one of the worst things I could do. And, writing about it allows me to acknowledge it, and in doing so to also acknowledge Maria, even when it feels like everyone else has forgotten.

  • My Birthday…Again

    My birthday this year feels almost completely inconsequential. A way to arbitrarily (yet consistently) mark the passage of time.

    My first post-loss birthday arrived only a few short weeks after my daughter died. I was still in the earliest blackness of grief, feeling numb, like I was moving through water. The last thing I wanted to do was to celebrate myself just for being born. My daughter had been born, and that was much more significant to me at the time, but very few people wanted to hear about her or talk about her. It was like the circumstances of her death had erased her birth.

    Now, four years later, my birthday still hasn’t reclaimed any of its former sparkle or shine in my mind. I used to look forward to and enjoy my birthdays; at a minimum they were an excuse for a celebration with loved ones. This year, I am (mostly) pretending to be excited about my birthday for the sake of my living child. There is a small part of me that is, surprisingly, actually excited. This is because I am starting to look forward to the next decade of my life: my 40s. Maybe because I am imagining, by then, having settled more deeply into my new post-loss reality, and even having found new meaning and purpose in my life related to my new, whole self, including who I am because of my loss experience. 

    There is also a larger part of me that knows that tomorrow is not guaranteed, nothing is guaranteed, and so I should try to be grateful and live my life to the fullest today, right now. I am doing this as well as I can, finding as much meaning as possible in how I choose to spend my time, and continuing to work on becoming a better person.

    But it is still nice to imagine that future I described. And today, this is what I’ll choose to be grateful for.

  • Mother’s Day 2025

    My Mother’s Day this year was surprisingly and unexpectedly peaceful. I think I felt a lot of my more turbulent emotions last weekend during Bereaved Mother’s Day, a holiday that sometimes seems to be only known and recognized by the bereaved parents that it is supposed to be honoring. It is a holiday that is supposed to shed light on our grief as bereaved parents, but it seems to exist in the shadows alongside our losses. For me, this year, that thought in particular saddened me. It also highlighted the superficiality of Mother’s Day; bereaved mothers are also mothers, and it seems to me to be more evidence that Mother’s Day only honors the parts of motherhood that our society is comfortable embracing.

    I am grateful to still be completely off of social media, which continues to provide my battered heart with an additional layer of necessary protection during each anniversary and holiday. For me, the positives of departing social media continue to far outweigh the negatives.

    Feeling those emotions on Bereaved Mother’s Day last week helped me to embrace the aspects of Mother’s Day today that are routinely celebrated by parents of living children. I was able to spend the day with my family, including my living child, and experience gratitude for our health and lives. As a bereaved mother, I know that nothing in this life is guaranteed, and this year I chose to focus on that gratitude as much as I could.

    I miss my daughter, and I always will. And even on the days that caring for my living child proves utterly exhausting, I feel a steady undercurrent of profound gratitude for this time we have been given together. I don’t know what the future holds, and that scares me, even more than it used to prior to losing her. Especially when my grief surges forward, I do my best to focus on the here and now, a strategy that has helped to carry me through some difficult times in the past. Here and now, I am doing ok. I’m not sure how I’ll be doing a day from now, or an hour from now, or sometimes even a minute from now. But right now, I’m doing ok.

    I know now that Mother’s Day is complicated for many people, for many different reasons. And I am taking this quiet time, this writing time, to reflect on those reasons, and to hold space in my heart for the complexity of what motherhood, in all of its beautiful, loving, and heartbreaking forms, actually means.