run this amazing day

Most people didn't even know that I was pregnant. In theory, that should have made it easier, when my baby died. Easier than when I miscarried my first, just shy of a year ago now. When I found out I was pregnant again, how I felt was complex. Lucky. Hesitant. Optimistic. Terrified. But it wasn't the fear that threatened to crush me. Anyone who has lived within this loss understands that it was the sudden and unnerving blaze of hope, swiftly followed by the immediate urge to stamp it out before Lucy could yank the football away. So I squashed down (most of) my gleeful blabbermouth tendencies. I had recently read something saying we should wait six months before sharing big news: a new job, moving across the country. Having a baby. I generally try to ignore random internet recommendations as I prefer to create my own senseless and complicated rules for life, but this one stuck. I'd keep it to myself. I'd nestle into cautious contentment and carry on carefully, carefully,

Last year I climbed a mountain on Christmas Day. It's one of my favorite hidden backcountry wanders in Colorado. When I tell anyone about it, I say, I'm taking you to the top of the world.  I packed the car the night before and crept out well before dawn, snowshoes and pb&js, carols on the car stereo and coffee in Evergreen. I was parked at the rundown mine shaft by 6:30 and heading up the trail just as the sun started to rise. The first two miles are pretty flat but then it pitches upwards and the final push is about a quarter-mile which, depending on how deep the snow is, can take an hour or more. It's a slog. As the saying goes, they take pictures of mountain climbers at the top, not along the way, because who wants to remember the rest of it? The relentless climb, the searing burn in your lungs as the air thins, heart pounding wild and primitive while you trudge upwards, thick and slow. No one takes pictures of that, no one wants to remember the suffering once it

When I was eleven or twelve years old, I won a talent competition at church. ( I've actually talked about this before, but any excuse to post this photo.) It was the first time in my life that I felt like  I had done something well. I was never going to be an opera star, or a rock star, or any kind of star, because to be truly excellent and rise to the absolute top, you need to have about seventeen different kinds of hammers in the toolbox you carry around inside your chest and I had only one.  I still have it, it sleeps quietly inside me, snoring softly, and I only ever really let it out to play when I'm alone in my car or the stairwell or a really excellent empty locker room. It's not the ability to really dig in and rip it, although any karaoke night anywhere will try and teach you otherwise. It's being able to blow the goddamn doors off the sucker, but almost never doing so. It's the other end of the continuum, the softness, the sensual gentleness that comes fr

There is no way to brace for this impact: I lost the baby. I've had to find ways to write it, to say it out loud again and again. It's impossible to sugarcoat it. I can't put a positive spin on it; even me, the eternal optimist, is unable to find some shining way through. There's a really good reason that no one ever talks about this, and that's because it's fucking unbearable. How do you grieve a life that never was, how do you mourn the loss of not only that life, but of hope? Why do we say it this way, my child has been lost , when I think it's actually my own soul that will forever roam, invisible and misplaced at sea, when it's me who has vanished into a violent squall of heartbreak? It is my body that feels quiet and desolate, hushed in unfamiliar stillness. I am the one that can't breathe, that has been blown apart, that is not surviving. A week or so after it happened, I was chatting briefly with a friend, and he said something that resonate