She's in the Past: Don't think so.

I met this lady at the pool today. Somehow we started talking, one thing led to another and I did something I avoid these days: I told her I'm pregnant. It seems most people are unsure of my state these days, I'm in that lovely place between looking fat and pregnant.

Since there is no other child visible around me and I'm relatively young, she assumed it was my first and told me how when she was pregnant with her first, she was on complete bedrest and now her son lives in Calgary. Well, I told her that when I was pregnant with my first, all was completely well until my daughter died and now she is at the local cemetery.

This is my second child.

The lady was nice about it, said how sad it is, as I hoped, but then it came out: Don't worry about it, everything will be ok. WHAT HAPPENED IS IN THE PAST, NOW is the FUTURE. So DON'T THINK ABOUT IT (she didn't yell it, but might as well).

WTF. Really? You are so scared of a baby dying that you'd rather pretend it's possible to treat it as something like milk spoiling? Throw out the old bottle and get a new one, all is well, it's in the past.

Yes, Amelia's life, death, and birth are all in the past. But those three things changed me as a person: she made me a mother and I experienced bereavement. While I don't plan on staying in grief for the rest of my life, a child's death is not something that a parent can process quickly. Her death is recent enough for me.

The fact is, there most likely would not be a Wiggles, had Amelia not died. I would be at the pool with her instead. As strange as the statement sounds, nothing about this is normal, with a sixteen-month old at home, we had no plans of having another child. We wanted ONE child, a daughter. Yet, here I am, pregnant again.

That idea of having just one kid I did put behind myself. It's in the past, as I now want more children.

But my daughter is NOT in the Past. She is in the Present, in the form she changed into at the time of her death: she's in our hearts and thoughts, in the actions we do or do not take, in the people we meet. She is as much in the present as she would have been had she lived, it's just that my mommy group would have included live babies instead of dead ones, our conversations would be about different things, and so on. She is here, just not how we'd like her to be. If your son is in Calgary, that doesn't mean he's in the past! You still think and talk about him!

So here it is: death is not the end of someone for those close to him or her. It's a change of state. Deal with it.