I like this quote. I’ve never thought of myself as a strong person, or a couragous person, but this quote echos what so many people have told me. Strength is simply getting up in the morning. It is trying again after you have fallen.

Many people told me that you can’t go under or over or around grief, you have to go through it. Recognizing that sentiment and actually doing it are two very different things. Of course going through grief is the only way to the other side. But what exactly does that mean? What does “through it” consist of? To me dealing with the grief means facing the things that hurt the most. I wrote in a previous post that you have to hurt to heal. But you know, if you face something enough you start to see it a different way.

Like Devin’s picture. I used to cry every time I looked at his picture, so I wouldn’t look at it very often, it hurt so much, like someone was wrenching my heart. But I would take time every day, or every other day, to pull it out and cry. Then I’d put it back in the box. Then I got to a point where I would pull it out and just stare at it. No crying, just aching. I found myself leaving his photo up on my screen and looking at it frequently, just staring at it. Then I started forgetting that it was up there, just going about my other things. It didn’t hit me in the face every time I saw it – I recognized it, but kept moving. Now I have his framed photo up in our house, and it just seems normal to be there. During the memorial I found that I wasn’t the one crying when I looked at his photo (and the other photos) – I actually realized, with some surprize, that I was smiling as others looked at it. For them it brought up all the emotions. For me I smiled with pride, thinking about how beautiful my son was. And I thougth to myself, isn’t this weird. I should be the one crying, and I’m not.

But then there are some things that get easier, but still aren’t pleasant or easy or worth putting myself through. And I guess I’m just going to have to concede to some things being not worth my effort and the sorrow it causes. I’ll try again later.

Yet sometimes the things that I think will be easy are hard, and the things I expect to be beyond my ability aren’t so bad after all. It’s strange how it works.

I know – and am very thankful – that I have been able to closely follow along with Kel’s baby boy and still feel as connected to him as I am. It has been a small blessing in all of this chaos. I decided my connection to him was due to Kel and my very close relationship as well as the circumstances of his birth.

Most pregnancy groups I had to politely step away from because of the painful reminders. After seeing a couple of happy “so-and-so is here!” posts and my resulting feeling of a knife twisting in my chest I decided it was simply too much for me to handle. I admit to feeling that way about a lot of blogs, even infertility blogs.

There is, however, one group that I have not had to step away from for more than brief periods. One small forum of infertiles, 5 or so of us due at the same time after various infertility treatments. Because there were only 5 of us we became closer than on due date groups where there are 30 or 40 of you. Also, we were all infertiles, coming from a very similar emotional space. Some of them have dealt with a lot of pain during pregnancy, some with bedrest, and yet the complaints are always minor, with a heavy dose of gratitude. That’s not to say that others are not grateful for their pregnancy, but there is a different sense of it after infertility. It’s a different way of seeing the world, for sure.

So I find myself clicking on that forum several times a day and reading along. I have a sense of I should be upset about this, yet I’m not. It’s very… weird.

It helps that I read a little about the newer groups of infertiles who got pregnant after we did, and think to myself that I could be next. That thought really pulls me through.

For those times when I am able to stick around my different pregnancy groups, I feel very thankful that everyone accepts me. I obviously stay out of any baby threads for my own sake, but I do sometimes peek into the post-partum threads and ask some questions, throw out some comments. It’s kind of nice to be fully recognized as someone who has been there, done that, even if I didn’t get to come home with the prize. I feel very lucky in that no one in any of my forums or groups online treats me like the scary elephant in the room. Conversation doesn’t stop when I speak up about my loss (you know, how everyone thinks to themselves, gosh, whatever I was going to say seems so stupid, she lost her baby… and conversation just dies?). I like being included.

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A couple of years ago I installed a family tree program on my computer and have been inputting the facts that I know about. Mostly I did it to try to keep things straight in my head, especially with Den’s weird family tree, but I do find fact-tracking to be kind of fun. When I got pregnant I thought it was important to have history to pass down. I thought about Devin one day looking back at everything I have and appreciating it.

When Devin died I felt, like never before, a sense of how important the past is. Before that I had always been most concerned with the present – who was related to whom, and how. Now that doesn’t matter nearly as much as what could be lost. Everything I have done for Devin since his death has been with the knowledge that he is gone and it’s our memory that keeps him alive. Our children will grow up knowing their older brother through our stories, journals, photos. I started thinking about all those who have died in the family. There are people who remember them, remember their stories, but who has written them down? Who will remember when they are gone too?

When I found out mom was coming to visit I asked her to bring all her family trees and family history. She has done a lot of work in the past compiling birth and death dates and putting together a family tree for her many relatives; I only had a small piece of it. Today we sat down, the two of us, unfurled the many taped-together pages of several large family trees, and entered them into my computer program. There is so much there than I thought. I didn’t realize the size of the tree, the number of relatives that I have heard little about and never met.

More interesting to me, however, were the stories. I find that genealogy is missing so much. I love having a computer program to help me make print-outs and keep things straight in my head, but there is so much missing between the dates of birth and immigration records and marriages and re-marriages. Who will remember that my dad’s Granny Mac lived on the seaside, with a long long set of steps leading from her place to the beach, and that she was an “old english warhorse”? There is so much missing. And I want to find it all out.