A Love Letter To A Dead Girl

Hi.

10 years is a long time. I wish you could know that. I wish you too could feel the bittersweet weight of 10 very full years of memories and love and growth and sadness and excitement and anger and hope and learning and frustration and haircuts and getting dirty and cleaning up and getting dirty again and delicious meals and snow forts and blanket forts and flying and birthday presents and creativity and skinned knees and stubbornness and laughter and ... and ... ... and. And there is so much here. There is everything here. Everything but you.

I think you would have enjoyed your first decade on this earth.

I know we would have enjoyed your first decade on this earth.

Some people talk about moving on as if I can just leave The Sad behind and go towards The Happy - but I feel that it's not about moving away from The Sad, it's about moving on with it. Under it. In it. It's waking up each day knowing that loss is always here because you're not.

Does this mean I think of you every day? I have to be honest - I don't. Not anymore, at least. But 10 years ago, I'm not sure I believed that to be possible. Maybe theoretically, intellectually - in that part of my soul that somehow knows some things to most likely be true even if I can't find any other reason to believe them. But it was too raw and too real, too deep and too personal, too confusing and too abrupt, to feel like it would ever be anything other than all-present and all-consuming.

As the time has gone by, I've found myself more interested in the immediate, bloody, candid pictures of your dead body than the posed, touched up, decolorized, pretty pictures that were taken later that night or the dressed up, decaying pictures taken the next morning. You were so close to life in the first pictures - so frustratingly close. Roughly 2 days before this picture, your heart was beating and your feet were kicking. And then there you were, lifeless in our arms.

So close. So very far.

I can still hear the nothingness - the anticlimactic, antiseptic, procedural atmosphere of your birth. The casual, contemplative mutterings of the doctor as he and the nurse checked for the cause of death, only to find none. No explanation. No happy busywork from the nurse. No sighs of relief and smiles of joy from us. Just the silence - and it continues today.

I can still feel the sobs shaking our bodies as we said goodbye to yours - letting them wheel you out the door like we were giving up on you. Abandoning you. Forgetting you. I promise that we wanted to stay there with you forever, hoping that maybe the next time we looked over, you'd be moving. Maybe the next time we woke up, it'd be to your cries. Maybe the next time we felt your skin, it'd be warm and soft.

As I write this, I keep crying because I wish I could kneel down in front of you - like I sometimes do with your sisters and brother - and look into your eyes and speak directly to you instead of having to process all of this through some sort of convoluted written attempt at understanding my feelings.

And as I write this, I wish there was more to say. I wish we had things to talk about, laugh about, learn about. Instead I'm just left here wondering how it's possible for me to love so fiercely somebody I've never even met.

I love you.

Dad