I am having a rough time today. I have been doing really quite well, even this week… but today after visiting the cemetary I’ve just been overwhelmed with anger.

I see casual mentions of people I barely know being pregnant and it angers me. People whom I know well it is not so hard, but people I know only peripherally are the hardest. Because I don’t know them. I don’t know if they “deserve” it. And all I can do is picture how freaking naive they must be, how easy it was to get pregnant on a whim and how easily they are going to have a healthy baby. And here I am, someone who has struggled and fought and revelled in every single moment of my pregnancy and I have no baby. It just makes me snarl and shake I am so furious. “It’s not fair” is a common refrain, one that has absolutely no meaning when you’re looking at life being without reason in the first place, but I can’t help it from reverberating endlessly in my head. It’s not fucking fair. All the jerks and assholes have babies; the people addicted to crack, the ones who don’t give a flying fig about their children. And yet me, I have a baby buried in a cemetary. The thought makes me furious.

I don’t know how to get past this. I don’t know, at this point, if I ever will. I struggled with a degree of anger through our initial infertility, though it wasn’t this potent. It did abate during pregnancy, though. I was too happy to be angry. The baby had healed some of those wounds – made them less raw, less hurtful. I can only hope that the next one will work the same magic on my fragile heart.

We, the parents, are supposed to be the protectors. We’re supposed to keep our children safe. But this future child, it saves me.

::

Our ride home from the cemetary was very quiet. Denis reached over the center console and gripped my hand. Today was the first time we had visited his grave and it hurt. It was a little startling to walk up to this tiny patch of earth, to see how closely the graves were placed together. They take up so little room, these little babies. We had searched quickly through the wooden stakes, handwritten with a number and a name, until we found number 88. Baby St Jean.

We had expected more, I guess. I pictured a carefully tended, golfcourse-quality lawn with perfectly aligned number-engraved stones placed in rows. Not this haphazard patch of wooden stakes. It hurt. They deserved better. All of them.

We never really intended to do anything at the cemetary. We were content with a nicely engraved numbered marker, content to use our yard – his tree – as “his” spot. But today as we stood there we knew without speaking that we couldn’t leave it like that. He needed more.

After we had been on our way home for a good 15 minutes in silence I said aloud, “I wish he were in a cemetary closer to home.”

“We should have known better,” Den replied. “We should have known our minds would change.”

But how could we. The easiest option at the time, sitting in the hospital in labor with a dead baby, was to let the hospital take care of it. We entrusted him to them and I was relieved by it. We didn’t have to contact funeral homes or cemetaries, we didn’t have to worry about paying for anything. It was too much for my brain to handle. It hadn’t mattered enough at the time. We had never dealt with anything like this – I had only ever been in a cemetary once before, and that was for one of Den’s extended relative’s funeral. What did we know about cemetaries and burials? What did we know about what we would need down the road? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

He’s not that far away, but it seems far. I wish he was just down the road, in a local cemetary in our town. Maybe we’d visit him, maybe we wouldn’t, but I wish it was closer. And I can’t do anything about it now. That’s probably a good reason I am struggling with so much anger today – there is so much I can’t change. There is nothing I can do.

I never thought I’d care about where he was buried. What did it matter, he wasn’t there. But I think the tree nearly dying nearly did me in. It is no longer my place of peace. Even when we do put a stone there, until that tree comes back next year I am not going to be able to feel safe about it… I feel like I am still just waiting for it to die. It was his replacement, in a way – a replacement for a grave – and emotionally it got yanked away from me. So what did I have left? The grave itself. The thing we had never thought much about.

And I have to say, I think I kind of like the idea of burial. The show I have been watching a lot of lately is Bones; perhaps that seems like an odd choice, but it doesn’t bother me nearly as much as I thought it would. In fact, I find comfort in it. It reminds me that even when the person is gone, the bones remain. They tell a story. They tell the world that this person lived. Devin’s grave, and the memorial stone that will stand above it, that is what they do: they tell the world that he lived. When people walk by they will read “Devin St. Jean, March 6, 2008.” They probably won’t know who that is, but they will know that he is there and when he lived… and that someone cared enough to put a stone there. For a moment they may even feel sad, thinking about this little baby who never got a chance, whose parents weep for what they cannot hold. No matter how brief, Devin will live on in those passing thoughts. He has a footprint in this world, on this earth… a tiny, baby-grave sized footprint.

I’m all a-jumbled tonight. This is all too much to deal with at 26 years old. My body is so young, but my soul feels old and weary. 26 is supposed to be the start of your life… starting a family, buying a home, settling down from your crazy young days. Instead I have nearly three years of infertility under my belt and worries over a grave.

It’s not surprizing to me that my life took such a different, harder path than the girls I knew back in highschool. I never fit in, even back then. I think my soul knew my life wasn’t going to be an easy one. But, unlike back then, I no longer long to be different. I don’t want to stand out any more. There is the good kind of special, and then there is the kind you’d give back in a heartbeat. Somehow it turned out all wrong.