It’s been a while since I wrote here. H.’s mobility has skyrocketed (how thankful we are), so neither one of us is often still. I dive in when time permits, like now, when H. is sleeping and I can see far more of the sky through naked branches. The rest of the time, memoir progress hovers, in my thoughts as H. and I go about our day. In notes I scribble and tuck back in a pile. Words, just like hearts, are everywhere, yet they form one at a time.

 

 

And your hearts have not slowed down one bit. I’m thrilled to announce that the Chain-Link Heart Project has reached (and already surpassed) 3,000 hearts! (Not counting my own.) Two Decembers ago it launched, after many a heart had begun appearing at my feet and Ruby’s paws. Please keep them coming. They are such a perfect symbol for Lorenzo, for love, for hope, for all the things we think of when a heart invites us to pause.

 

 

It’s also taken this time to start putting together another kind of book for Lorenzo. A book of memories, the idea inspired by a friend who also lost recently, the scrapbook itself from Italy and given over a decade ago. Who knew its pages were waiting for this story? I thought it would just include all of the beautiful cards that were sent by many of you, both before and after. But as I started compiling, I added all I could that reminds me of him: calendars of late May and early June, that postcard there on my story board, those photos of my pregnancy, the last ones where I still see my innocence. And that deserves to be celebrated, too. I had that with him, after all, only him. There is poetry, too. There are dry leaves and hearts galore and certain colors. H. played at my feet as I cut and collaged—giving me a rare sense of what it is like to tend to my children simultaneously.

 

 

I’ve left blank pages, too, because Lorenzo’s story isn’t finished. Outwardly, a post from this blog will be published in a bereavement newsletter from the hospital where I delivered him. Another will be included in an educational anthology. Inwardly, I recognize him as clearly as I do my own consciousness. We mark anniversaries and holidays without him here. I design a Christmas card and wonder how best to include him. The simplest things aren’t so. As Ryan says over dinner one night, “Somewhere, he’s two.” I surprise even myself with how many of the words are still about him. I worry that may wear on you and sometimes that keeps me away from here, too. Then I update my Recommended Reading page with other loss blogs and see how many moms are writing one and two and five years on.

 

 

Two and a half years on. One of my cousins asks me if I’ve written about that, about how I’m not fixed, even with H. And perhaps I haven’t so overtly. Or perhaps it’s all I can write about. H. has fulfilled me. She is the focus of my life. I look at her and think, Of course you are here. Like her dad, she likes music, to play it, to hear it. Like me, she likes books, particularly the kinds where part of the page folds back to reveal a surprise. She snuggles with bath toys, a quirk all her own. She crawls over to me to check in before scaling the hill of my crossed legs back to her toys, then to me, and so on for an afternoon. But she also adds to my need to discuss Lorenzo when conversation turns to our children, to say I knew he was a boy just as I knew she was a girl, that my belly looked different with each, that I labored both, that I try to see where they look alike, that I wonder what H. will say when we turn the pages of this book together one day. Isn’t that only natural, mothers of many? Don’t you, mothers of the lost, take opportunity to bring them into the light? Isn’t that fulfilling, too?

 

 

I recently read an incredible book about how other cultures grieve their children, and I wonder if it would be any easier somewhere else. If I were Japanese, say, and offering gifts to a Mizuko jizo statue so my child, my water baby, may be protected in his afterlife. If that ritual, created solely for children like Lorenzo, was embedded in the culture so it made sense to all of us. The whole book switches the Western perspective of grief from something we focus on within to something we act upon on behalf of our lost children and their well-being—now. So I continue to raise Lorenzo. I ask you to help me collect hearts. I assemble a memory book over back-to-back days and bask in the teary warmth of it. I take a map Ryan’s mom gave us long ago from the top shelf of H.’s closet. It bears a faraway star named for him. Quite suddenly, I want it framed. Once the heart is added or the book bursting at its seams or the map hung, things are still again. Then H. crawls with glee down the hall. And we are off.