My Heart Mourns in Iowa

I have this amazing group of friends. There are about twenty of us. We live all over, our backgrounds are varied, but from the beginning our hopes were the same. We all wanted to be mothers. And while we all began trying to conceive our children, we found one another online on a message board. That was almost 4 years ago. In that time, we have shared some of our most intimate details, we have been in touch with one another daily, we have become a sisterhood of sorts. We seek each other out whenever we’re near, some go on vacation together, some talk on the phone everyday. We’ve celebrated the births of many babies, we’ve stood by fertility heartbreaks, we’ve shared the routine and mundane.

Yesterday I found out one of my dear friends from this group tragically lost her 9 month old baby daughter. At this point, they suspect something related to SIDS took her life. She passed away during her nap. And so my dear wonderful friend is currently living her worst nightmare. Tomorrow, she buries her baby girl.

Since hearing this news, my life initially halted. I broke down repeatedly. But it seemed in a vaccuum, with no one around me feeling the depth of such a loss. And then, because her death doesn’t directly affect my daily life here, I was forced to continue hiccuping along. Her daughter is gone but I still have to get milk for tomorrow, my 5 year old still needs to be picked up from school and we are still actually having people over for dinner.

But really, I have wanted to hop on the next plane out of here. My heart isn’t here right now. It’s in a million pieces surrounding my friend in Iowa. While she sits in her home, staring at an empty crib.

This little girl leaves such beautiful memories behind. She gave my friend 9 amazing months of sweet smiles and happy blue eyes. She always said she was the best baby in the world. And I agreed with her. She slept so well. She never fussed. She adored her older sister. She laughed, she smiled, she carried on gladly. My friend’s daily updates on facebook would read something like this: “I’m watching my girl naw on a carrot in her high chair and laugh. She is just so cute!” That baby girl was simply a happy, happy child. And I know that happiness had everything to do with her very wonderful mother.

Thank God for the rest of my friends, however. Some of them are able to fly to Iowa for the funeral. Some of us will be there for her. I am forever grateful. Because we should be there. We have shared ovulating, seven week old heartbeats, ultrasound pictures, and finally, joyfully we’ve ushered so many babies into this world. When my two year old was born, they were told immediately – and they posted his picture and celebrated in their respective corners of the world. They were the first to call or send things. These women love their babies.

And now one of these babies has died. Its unbearable. And so part of our group is flying into Iowa from New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Maryland, they are driving from far corners of the Midwest, they are leaving their babies with husbands to group together in a potentially sketchy Comfort Inn they found on priceline. These women, my friends, will be there to surround my dear friend and hold on to her grief as she buries her girl. One of the babies has died.

Oh my heart is broken. I wish I could be there. I am so sorry I can not be. My friend. Her loss. Its horrible.

But the sun keeps coming up and my kids need me to help me with their homework. Life goes on. And it should. And it will for my friend too. She is strong and will move through this pain. One day it won’t hurt as much to breathe. I hope I can help her enough from where I sit here, so far away, in Florida.

Usually I have a point to my posts. Some sort of bottom line or moral to the story. But I don’t have one today. This post is simply my public profession that I am mourning the life of a beautiful 9 month old girl. So no words of wisdom today. There is simply no point to the death of a child. None.