Another Endless Night

I want to run away. I don’t want to be here anymore. I can imagine myself in places all over the world, sitting, accepting, some place that is quiet and strange to me. I can see myself breathing out my days with some sense of . . . peace? With some sense of rest.

I can’t sleep at night. I either refuse to go to bed because of some free floating anxiety or I wake up again and again and can’t fall back asleep. Grief is choking me. It creeps up on me while I lay in the dark with my eyes closed and suddenly I hear my mind say, “My mother is dead.” It’s as if I just realized it. I weep. My mother is dead.

There are framed photographs of my daughter in my room, taken during the four days that she was mine. She’s so pristine, so frozen. She seems like a dream, like a memory of something I made up. She’ll be eight months old in a couple of weeks. After that, years will pile up, time will pass, and one day she’ll be a child, and then an adolescent, a young woman. And I may see her from time to time, we may even become friends if God is merciful in his will. But what of all the days in between? What of all the discoveries and abilities and a thousand mental photographs of her that I will never carry with me? The way she will watch television on her stomach on the floor, feet waving lazily in the air? The exact angle of her chin when she refuses to clean her room? Her very favorite dress she will remember from her childhood?

I keep thinking that things are going to turn out differently than they do. I plan, and my plans come to nothing. And, this is the reason that my relationship with Simon is such an ordeal. He’s someone I can do something about. Or so I thought. And in him is wrapped my other losses. I thought he might be my husband, and so, and as such, he and I could have had more children. More little girls whose ins and outs I might have been able to know and carry with me. My mother wrote him an email before she died, asking him to come to visit me for my birthday. Even then to be thinking of me . . . and of course he didn’t.

It’s only two in the morning. It’s really not that late. I don’t want to go to sleep. My heart is aching. I don’t know what to do now. For more than just tonight, I just don’t know what to do.

The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.

Tags: Barbara Sue, confusion, grief, insomnia, loss, Natalie Grace, Simon

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