I keep seeing hearts. I find a stone shaped like one on the sand. I step over a spray-painted pink one on the sidewalk. I notice them decorating benches. When we landed in Perú and were driving from the airport out to the coast, I saw a large, hollow, wooden one on the second-story balcony of a road-side home. It had to be at least five feet across. Someone must have shaped it and built it and set it there, and I happened to look out the window at just the right time in order to see it.

 

 

I focus on the hearts. First and foremost, they remind me of my son. Not that I need reminders—he is always with me. Not that his heart was whole—it was halved and incompatible with life. But the hearts—these outward symbols of both the emotional and the physical—also remind me of the love in this world and the impulse to represent it with a universal shape made up of two curves that start together and reach up and out and curve before folding back down into a point. That reminder of love is what I need. Especially when the anger bubbles and I want to scream and ask why my baby’s heart wasn’t whole and I shake my head wondering how things can go so wrong when you do everything so right.

 

 

I don’t scream or shake over the small things anymore. This tragedy has greatly handicapped that stress response. Where once I flared, now I might only sort of simmer or just stand numb in the water. But sometimes something small does happen—let’s say I lock myself out of the house—and I feel the ol’ stress response coming on. I don’t want to be that person. It may not make sense, but I am so changed by my son that I either don’t want to be the way I was before (i.e. easy to stress) or literally can’t be that way (i.e. youthful or readily given to bliss).

 

 

But time goes by, like everyone has been telling me it does. Your feet keep covering ground, even if it’s just around and around your neighborhood with your dog, and the next time you look up there are blossoms on the trees. An entire season has changed. The world has kept turning. Other babies have been made. So while I am not healed, as they say of time, and while this too has not passed, as they say of things, there is a quantifiable distance I cannot deny. It is no longer the month I held my son or even the season. Not so long from now, it will no longer be the year. As Gillian Welch so beautifully sings, “Time’s the revelator.”

 

 

Sometimes I wonder if I’m getting through the days simply because I’m getting used to them as they are. As much as I dislike that very thought, there it is. I am getting used to being the first-time mom who lost her child. I am getting used to embodying the grief. But the act of “getting used to” does not preclude discomfort and anxiety and feeling at a loss. What will I say when, God willing, I have another baby one day and someone asks if he or she is my first? If I say NO, they will ask about my surely older, surely living child and I will have to explain. If I say YES—if I lie to make this other imaginary person more comfortable—have I denied my son?

 

 

This person isn’t so imaginary. I’ve already been asked three times if I have any children. For so many, it’s such an innocuous comment, as is “Are you pregnant?” as is “Do you want kids?” as is “Oh, once you have kids, you’ll see…” as is “Do you want a boy or a girl?” These are little landmines now. While I don’t always know which way to go, I know enough now not to ask such questions of other people now. It’s not just the people you meet face to face either. Recently, a credit card customer service rep declared upon my telling her I lived in Santiago: “Oh! I have a daughter! Moving there! With a baby! Do you have any children?! “No,” I said. “I don’t.” It was and wasn’t the truth, but she wasn’t a person with whom I needed to get closer to the truth. Still, it didn’t feel right.

 

 

I owe my son his rightful place both in my heart and when I speak. He has all of me that way, even my eyes as I look upon this world and see so many hearts scattered about it.