Moving On, Being Haunted: Amy on Loss

I don’t fully understand how I’ve chosen which things to move on from and which things haunt my soul.

I too suffered a miscarriage although slightly earlier than yours. Perhaps I was not yet fully connected or maybe never entirely secure in the pregnancy but I mourned the loss and moved on – quickly in the scheme of things.

I lost my Grandmother last year. I stood next to her in the emergency room and placed her hand on my hugely pregnant belly and watched her smile through her tears. She waited until all three of her daughters arrived before she left us. Days later I spoke at her memorial service with a smile on my face. Please don’t misunderstand. It’s not that I wasn’t/aren’t sad. I feel her loss almost everyday. But I understand the truth of it. I don’t argue the reality.

On the other hand, I can not get over my parents selling my childhood home. It happened almost two years ago and still I feel a heavy churning in my stomach and tears come to my eyes when I think of it. The best guess I’ve come up with is that their home – the home of my youth – being gone attaches in some way to the reality of my adulthood. Maybe for all time before, there was some bit of myself as child that could still exist. Some place to go back to if all else failed. (And it has.) But no longer. I’m forty. I’ve been a mother for going on eleven years. I am most certainly a grown up. But I don’t always want to be.

This piece originally appeared as a comment on Farewell, and Welcome Home.