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2001-12-29 | 4:59 p.m.

So today I read this Wired article about dead baby memorials on the Web, which made me think of a memorable diary entry that I came across months ago. I'm not sure where I stand on the whole debate but it's certainly unsettling to come across one of these sites. Maybe you get used to it after a prolonged period of exposure, like hentai.

Not that I sit around watching hentai.

I had a friend---have a friend---who lost her baby at 3 months old. Result of a freak accident during surgery; very very sad. This happened just a few months before I met her. Anyway, she wrote up this whole grief manual, to help people talk to people who've lost a child. Which is good, because of course no one ever knows what to say in a situation like that and some people end up saying really inappropriate things. That's what happened to my friend. One of the things she said was that it was meaningful to occasionally mention the child who was lost and to talk about what they might have been like, and so on. So I did that one time after she moved away. I wasn't being all calculated about it; I was just thinking about my friend and how the girls would all be in the 4-5 range, and I sort of idly wondered which of my girls her first daughter would have gotten along with better. Well, I sent that e-mail about a year and a half or two years ago, and I haven't heard from her since. Part of it is that she lives on the other side of the country now, and I'm sure she's super-busy, but I can't help but wonder if that bugged her enough to make her not want to write me. Even though she said it was okay to talk about it in her grief manual! I swear I would never have mentioned it if I hadn't read that damn thing. I hope she's just busy. I sent her a Christmas card this year and I hope she'll reply sometime.

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