How can one tiny person elicit all that?

15 years early this morning since I held Nora while she took her final breaths. Maybe it's why I woke around that time and found my mind and heart traveling back to the beauty and intensity and grief and release that filled that night for Nora, Jason and me. As I get into a morning in the kitchen, I've got Over the Rhine on in the background, playing one of the songs (Born) that was most meaningful to me in my love journey with Nora. Some of the many thoughts and emotions flooding me include so many paradoxes and seemingly contrasting realities that I struggle to hold, but that our time with Nora brought me face to face with. 

How is it that one season of life could get me so in touch with my greatest strengths and most profound weaknesses all at once?

How could one little person unearth my capacity for a kind of love and care I had yet to experience, and also the capacity for such fear and resistance to accepting something that left me feeling so out of control?

How is it that grief can carve out a well of sorrow in us that over time also has the capacity to hold a depth of joy we had never experienced before?

How do I hold the death of one child next to the life of children I treasure who are so integral to our lives now, knowing that our family is what it is today because of Nora's life and death?

How can such a tiny little human teach me so much about how to live and most especially how to die? 

How is it that birth and death can feel so similar in the laboring towards release, in the beauty that comes in accepting the pain and flowing with and towards it (amazingly making it less painful and more powerful)?

How do I sort through having a baby who needed body fat more than anything for her very ability to sustain life and my pregnancy and time caring for her included some of my most intense periods of body loathing and struggle to accept what I perceived at that time as too much fat on my own?

How do I accept myself as Nora's mother when sometimes I truly didn't feel up for the job, felt my human capacity maxed in a way that I didn't know how I would keep going, felt it was asking me to give up too much, felt so inadequate and that I had so much healing to do in my own life to be better for her?

How could someone so little be so strong? How could she elicit so much happiness with her smiles? How did some family traits of "me do myself" show up so early when she would reject help holding her tiny board books even when she barely was strong enough to keep them from clunking her head? How did she know better what she wanted and needed (to hold, NOT suck, her binky) than I often do?

How could I feel so hollow returning home with full breasts and empty arms, but also so relieved when the home health van showed up to cart away feeding tube supplies and oxygen tanks?

How could I enjoy that first wood stove fire knowing our ability to heat with wood was because we no longer had a baby who needed oxygen?

So...Much...To...Hold! 

On this day, I feel so very grateful for those that were able to hold those things with me (sometimes for me); for those who reminded me of my goodness when I so needed help seeing it. Also for those that made the journey lighter by providing care for Kali, visiting us at UVA, making us meals, getting our home warm before we arrived with Nora from the hospital, cleaning, coming to help with our ongoing renovation projects, getting us out of the hospital for a meal and letting us be honest with all we were feeling and holding that with tenderness, providing us a home away from home in Charlottesville, praying for us, reading our emails and sending notes of encouragement, and loving us and Nora when we had very little to offer in return. Ultimately no one could walk this road for us, but we also did not walk it alone. To Nora's baby friend, to the most incredible neighbors one could ask for, to my parents, to UVA's palliative care team and Nora's nurse, Molly, who knew just what we needed the night she died, to other medical providers who became friends and shared our most vulnerable moments with us, to those that were with us the week that she died including my aunt who came even when I thought we would be ok without more help (not true!), and to all those that provided the tangible supports that helped make the days more possible...Thank you!