Update from CA (August 19th)

(This is an e-mail I sent before I started this blog)

To our wonderful support team,

So it has been almost three weeks since the arrival and departure of Pedro and Archer, and we wanted to let everyone know how we are doing. First, thank you all for the messages of condolence and love and support. I can't tell you how it helps us to hear from our friends and family, to know you are thinking of us and the boys, to hear the stories you have personally or have collected from your support teams of people who lost their first children and went on to have other successful pregnancies, to have and nurture and love children they might otherwise never have met. Thank you.

And many of you have asked if there is anything you can do for us. At first, we couldn't conceive of an answer to this question, but lately we have realized that there is something we need: please continue to be in touch with us. We may not be able to pick up the phone, or write back in any kind of timely or coherent fashion, but logging on and finding messages, looking at the cellphones and seeing texts and hearing voicemails, all help us to feel like we haven't fallen out of the world, inspire us to slowly rejoin the flow, to find the way to incorporate our new grief into our old life and look into the future. So when you think of it, send a quick note or text, or leave a voicemail. And know you are helping immensely.

OK, I promised to let you know how we are. I've been sitting here staring at the blinking cursor for a while now trying to figure out how to continue from here. Which is actually a pretty good description of how we are doing. It changes by the hour. We packed up our beautiful, hopeful hospital room on the Fri after their birth, left Portland on Sat (after picking up the boys' cremains: we had them cremated together, and we'll scatter their ashes over the coast somewhere) and took two days to drive down to my brother's house. We've cried a lot, talked a lot, run over every detail of those three and a half weeks and especially those last 72 hours, sorting through it, memorizing it, pressing it into our consciousness. Looking for blame, realizing there is noone and nothing to blame, finally finally even ceasing to blame ourselves. We miss the boys profoundly: we see them in every twinning we see. In two tall pines on a hike, in a pair of hummingbirds who zip through Eric's backyard. We take walks and talk to them, tell them we love them and are thinking of them.

Physically, we are mostly recovered: I've been to the Dr. for my two week check-up and the infection is gone and I've been cleared for all activities. I am having trouble with my heels, arches and ankles (from being in bed for nearly a month partnered with the induction medicine, the antibiotic course, and the epidural), but Bruno takes me for walks every morning and yesterday we even went to the gym, so bit by bit I'm recovering my mobility and balance. Won't even talk about the extra 30 pounds I'm sporting. And we are both managing to sleep, although we dream incessantly: first nightmares reliving the water breaking and the birth, now less literal dreams about death, betrayal, visitors. We're writing them all down.

Emotionally, this is gonna take a while, but we are taking baby step after baby step. We have our first group grief meeting tomorrow (HAND: Healing After Neo-Natal Death). And living with Eric and Dani and their three wonderful children has been a blessing. The kids keep us honest and keep us loving and even laughing; they are such glorious clowns, how could we not. As we add each new element (seeing a friend, cooking a meal, looking at a place to live, braving the Trader Joe's where we run into a gizillion pregnant women, and get asked when we are due) we feel any range of things from sorrow to anger to pain, and then we keep going. And so it goes.

We are off to Croatia on Fri to see Bruno's parents, and will be back on Sept 4th, when we'll move in with my parents for a bit. We'll have e-mail access the whole time, so if you find a moment, stay in touch. We love you all and are so grateful for all your support and help. -Lisa and Bruno