Secondary Loss.

When I wake up every day, I say good morning to my daughter as any mom would. I imagine as I enter her room that there’s a crib and a beautiful baby laying inside, smiling at me, ready to be held. I imagine smiling back at her, picking her up, holding her close.

Every morning, I remember that this is not my reality. Every morning, I have to reckon with the words, “your baby died” swirling around in my head.

I still go into her room every day. There’s no baby for me to hold, so I hug her bears—her bear that holds her ashes or her bear that weighs just as much as she did at birth. I talk to Evelyn. I sing to her. I tell her what we’re doing that day. I tell her about our hopes and dreams for her.

When Evelyn died, we didn’t just lose her. We lost a lifetime of memories with our daughter. We lost the innocence of enjoying a pregnancy. We lost everything that could have been and should have been.

Every future event we envisioned for her was gone instantly, events that we had planned for the rest of the pregnancy and everything after. We’ve already had to contend with canceled baby showers. We’ve had to find a place for clothes she will never wear and books we will never get to read to her. Her due date is looming, like a dark cloud following us around, getting ready to pour down on us and remind us that what we thought would be the happiest time in our lives is no longer.

The weekend after she died we drove past the elementary school by our new house, and I broke down. Every image I had conjured in my head of dropping Evelyn off on her first day of kindergarten, going to parent teacher conferences, volunteering at her school, all gone. These are things I will never get to do for my child. They’re visions that only exist in my head, events that will never come to be.

It’s not only the big events, like the birthdays or all the firsts. I overheard a new dad talking several weeks ago about how tired he was after constantly being up all night with their newborn. The person he was with asked how he liked being a dad and he just brushed the question off and kept complaining. I wanted to shake him and tell him our reality, that he could just as easily be us, with no baby to wake him in the middle of the night. I would give anything to be up all night with our daughter. I would give anything to be sleep deprived for a different reason. It’s not only the happy events I’m grieving—it’s the every day moments that others take for granted.

We will never experience a pregnancy the same. We lost the naivety of thinking we were “safe” after the first trimester. We will hold our breath every day, if and when that day comes. I will be considered high risk in a pregnancy, and we’ll never breath easily. We will never have a baby shower. We won’t plan and prepare for a new baby, because we know nothing is guaranteed. I’m grieving the innocence of thinking pregnancy meant having a baby.

Our grief is everywhere, in the plain moments and in the big moments. It’s never ending. Every day is some reminder of not only losing Evelyn, but losing ourselves, losing the way we thought the order of the world worked. We grieve Evelyn and the loss of her presence here, but we also grieve the what could- and should-have-beens. The memories we will never share with her.

As I’m working through what feels like never ending loss, I’m finding ways to hold onto our memories of Evelyn and create new ones. I feel her presence everywhere. I believe she sends us signs when we most need them, no matter where we are. We took a trip to Hocking Hills a few weeks ago and she was just everywhere with us. Everywhere we go, she is there.

The secondary losses are always just another reminder of everything that we’ll never have with our Evie, but we will always have our love for her. Even though I didn’t think it was possible, I love her more each day and look for ways to help us live in this new reality without her. The losses are so devastating, but our love for her persists and grows despite the pain.