Today is Christmas Eve. We woke up this morning with my son between us. My husband whispered in his ear that Santa was coming tonight. His eyes lit up with the magic of a three year old as he turned to tell me the wonderful news he had just heard. I smiled too, almost totally meaning it. I reminded him that it is also when Jesus was born. “Like baby sister” he said “Baby Jesus and baby sister are like twins.”

These past days have been rolling along a little better….just heavier. I finished reading a book. An Exact Replica of a Figment of Imagination by Elizabeth McCracken. It is about a woman whose first child was stillborn and she writes it right after the birth of her second child. Many things she wrote spoke to me. One passage in particular described in words I don’t have what kind of grief I feel. It is not the same kind of grief as most. It is a special, specific grief when you lose a child that you never really had.

“After most deaths I imagine, the awfulness lies in how everything has changed: you no longer recognize the form of your days. There’s a hole. Its person shaped and it follows you everywhere, to bed, to the dinner table, in the car.

For us what was killing was how nothing had changed. We’d been waiting to be transformed, and now here we were, back in our old lives.”

The hole for me is baby shaped, but I knew so little of her I can’t fill that hole with memories. Those are mostly awful. I can’t fill the hole with my imagination…imagining what I would be doing now, or how she would look. That would surely kill me. It just remains a hole. A reminder that nothing and everything is missing all at the same time.