Still feeling like I just got rolled down a hill inside a barrel of oil. Not sure how long this funk is going to last, really… just trying to keep my grip on things while it lingers. Sometimes that grip is just by a fingernail, you know? And I dream of packing my bags and running away back home, back to Canada, back to where life was simple and did not involve dead babies.

They say in your twenties you become an adult. It’s hard, they told me. Just wait until you have responsibilities… bills to pay, children to look after. Growing up isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, they said. If only they knew. That responsibility and hardship they warned of is still what I long for. Becoming an adult wasn’t supposed to be this.

Creeping up on 7 months now. 7 months until the world crashed down. It’s true… time does bring some remarkable healing qualities. Death becomes a part of your vernacular. At first it was all so raw – it was real, but full of spikes, full of disbelief. Now those same thoughts, those same words, are so familiar it lacks the shock it once held. There will always be a heaviness… an aura of incredulity about it. But now it is just a part of my life. I get used to it – not just to the words, but to the idea of it. There is reluctant acceptance that occurs as time marches on. I sometimes find myself talking about something dead-baby related just as I would anything else. A casual mention of a memory like any other. Except it involves my dead son. Sometimes I catch myself and wonder what other people think. They have no frame of reference.

I see many pictures of stillborn babies, it doesn’t bother me much anymore.. I’ve stared at my own so much I look past the strangeness and scariness… the “other.” Yet I still avert my eyes when I drive past a dead squirrel on the road.