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.
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