Motherlode: "When a Full-Term Pregnancy Ends Tragically"

Last Thursday (yes, I'm behind...!), the New York Times' Motherlode blog featured a post called "When a Full-Term Pregnancy Ends Tragically." A reader asked for advice on what to do following the stillbirth of her son's classmate's sibling. To date, almost 60 people have responded.

"We get particularly tongue-tied when a pregnancy goes wrong, because there are no road maps, no rituals, no familiar words," writes Lisa Belkin.

Scrapbooking your grief

Some of you know that -- odd as it may seem for a woman without children -- one of my favourite pasttimes & creative outlets (besides this blog, lol) is scrapbooking.

I've made scrapbooks for my parents' neighbours' daughter, my nephews, and I recently started an anniversary scrapbook for dh & me that I hope (hope!) will be finished by or around our 25th wedding anniversary next year.

I've always intended to someday (someday) make a scrapbook for Katie and chronicle our loss journey since then. I have a Rubbermaid box full of Classic Pooh papers, punches & stamps (some of them sent to me by my dear cyberfriend Julia S, some years ago) and a Classic Pooh s scrapbook album, as well as lots of butterfly-themed embellishments. But I haven't. Yet.

I just learned about a new blog that may be a good prod for me in that direction. It's focused on healing grief & loss (of all kinds) through scrapbooking.

Any other lossmama scrapbookers out there? Check it out!

People are idiots

I have come to the conclusion that people do not know how to behave in public anymore. Dh & I were at the cemetery yesterday afternoon to visit our daughter’s niche — the CEMETERY!! — & there was a young guy nearby, not only talking on his cellphone, but having a very LOUD argument with his ex-girlfriend.

I mean, if you absolutely MUST carry on a telephone conversation in a cemetery (??), could you at least walk away when you see other people are visiting a grave nearby? Or go sit in your car to talk? Or talk more quietly? Or something??

Barren B*tches Book Tour: "Moose" by Stephanie Klein

Gather round the campfire, everyone (& let's sing a round of Kumbaya while we're at it for Melissa, lol). It's time for another meeting of the Barren B*tches Book Brigade, the ALI (adoption/loss/infertility) community's virtual book club, organized by Melissa at Stirrup Queens. Participants read the same book and each submit a question to Melissa, who compiles & circulates a list of all the questions. We then answer at least three of them in our blog, and post at or around the same time on the same day. Melissa maintains the master list of participants on her blog.

I asked everyone to gather round the campfire because our selection this time is Moose: A Memoir of Fat Camp by Stephanie Klein, who blogs at Stephanie Klein's Greek Tragedy. The very thought of reading a book about summer camp while on my summer vacation seemed perfect, and while I must confess I never went to camp (let alone fat camp), I enjoyed this book a lot. I could practically smell the damp towels & bathing suits hanging up to dry and feel grains of sand between my toes as I read.

I always wanted to go to camp... but somehow it never materialized. Cost was probably a factor for my parents (and of course, if they sent me, they'd have to send my sister too), and we often spent several weeks during the summer at my grandmother's in Minnesota. Plus, where I grew up on the Canadian Prairies, very few people I knew went away to camp, let alone for the whole summer. Those who did go usually went to a camp sponsored by their church, or the 4-H Club, and rarely for more than week. When they got home, they'd tell us about all the cool kids they met (especially the boys) & teach us all the new campfire songs they'd learned.

Nevertheless, I got my camp fix through books (I particularly remember "Donna Parker: Mystery at Arawak") & movies -- like "Meatballs," "Little Darlings," and, most of all, the original version of "The Parent Trap" with Hayley Mills playing twins, separated as babies by their divorcing parents (Brian Keith & Maureen O'Hara), who meet by accident at summer camp and hatch a plot to switch places and then reunite their parents. I have seen that movie umpteen times -- first at the Saturday matinee when I was a kid in the late 1960s, and many times since then on TV & video. And I never get tired of it. (The remake, with a young Lindsay Lohan in the role of twins, and Dennis Quaid & the late Natasha Richardson as the parents, came out the same summer (1998) that I lost Katie. I went to see it with my mother, post-stillbirth, and while it was a pleasant diversion, I still prefer the original.)

Enough about my own camp experiences (or lack thereof). On to some of the questions.

What from your childhood led to a positive body image? And what, if anything, caused you to struggle with your own body image?

Weight was never an issue for me when I was growing up -- although I know I would have told you differently back then. No special pressures, just the normal pressures to be thin that any teenaged girl feels -- although I think the pressures have gotten far, far worse in recent years than they were when I was growing up in the 1970s. I haven't read my old diaries in years, but I well remember writing agonized comments to the effect of, "I am now 108 pounds!!! EEEEKKKK!!! I MUST LOSE SOME WEIGHT!!!" I look at pictures of myself now (or at the tiny pair of patched up cutoff denim shorts I wore in high school that still occupy the bottom drawer of the my old dresser at my parents) & I want to weep. I want to shake that girl by the shoulders & say, "Idiot, don't you realize how many girls would kill to have your body??" (Including your older self??)

(My younger sister was always the chubby one when we were children. Around the time we went into junior high, she suddenly grew taller and slimmed down, & has stayed thin ever since then. Until just a few years ago, she could still wear a pair of jeans she'd had in high school. B*tch.) (lol)

Wearing pretty clothes was an ego boost for me, as was getting to wear makeup, when I got older. Bodywise, my hair was always a source of pride for me (still is, I will admit) -- I have yet to encounter a hairdresser who doesn't comment in amazement over how thick it is.

If anything was an issue for me as a child, appearance-wise, it was my glasses. I had to get them when I was 7 years old, in Grade 2. At first, I thought getting glasses was kind of cool. I even wore sunglasses around the house as "practice" until my new glasses arrived. The novelty very quickly wore off, however. I can remember showing up at my maternal grandmother's house that summer wearing my new glasses, & sitting in the kitchen with my mother & aunts, fighting back tears while, outside, my cousins gathered at the screen door, giggling and pointing at me (led by the boy cousin closest in age to me, whose main pleasure in life always seemed to be teasing me).

(Funny, but for all that he tormented me while we were growing up, I'm very fond of my cousin. Of all my cousins on that side of my family, he's the one I wish I could see more often. He has three kids now, and both he & his mom have often said how much his oldest daughter, now a teenager, reminds them of me at the same age -- quiet, moody, a complete bookworm. I consider it poetic justice/karmic revenge against him, lol.)

I wore glasses for 10 years until I was 17, the summer before I went into Grade 12, and my optometrist (and my parents) finally yielded to my pleadings & let me get contact lenses (I still needed a pair of glasses as backup, though). I wrote a bit about my history with contacts, and what they did for me, here. Reading about Stephanie's first day back at school from fat camp reminded me a little of my first day of Grade 12 in September 1978, wearing my contacts and the "Annie Hall" style outfit I'd acquired with the money I'd earned working that summer -- an ankle-length pleated skirt, a grey flannel blazer over a white pinstriped blouse, salmon-coloured sweater vest and black skinny men's tie. And high-heeled, high-top boots. I didn't get quite the reaction Stephanie did, but I knew people were looking at me, and that I looked good. It gave me confidence.

*** *** ***

But somewhere after high school, as I went to university, got married and began to work, the pounds gradually began to creep on. For many people, seeing a picture of themselves is the wake-up call they need. For me, that picture was taken on my 30th birthday. I realized, looking at it, that there was nothing I could do about turning 30, but I could do something about how I looked. I promptly enrolled in the next session of Weight Watchers at Work held in my office building. That was February 1991, and by October, I had reached my goal weight (and even lost a few more pounds after that). At my lowest point, I was down 35 pounds from the previous winter. Yay me!!

I continued to attend the meetings for quite awhile afterward, as a Lifetime Member. At some point, though, I stopped tracking my food intake and stopped attending meetings. I started getting careless. The pounds began to creep on again. By the time I got pregnant in 1998, I was 15-20 pounds above goal weight; when I got pregnant, I gained another 15-20. After my daughter was stillborn, the weight never came off, it just sort of eventually rearranged itself. ; ) And I added a few more pounds on top of that. I tried going back to Weight Watchers a year or so after my pregnancy, while we were going through infertility treatments, but my heart just wasn't in it.

January 2007, I decided to try again. When I stepped on the scale (which is always a good 5 lbs heavier than the one I have at home), I was horrified: I was more than 50 pounds above my goal weight. I've continued to stick with WW (& shell out more & more money), as I think it's the most medically healthy/sensible & realistic plan that's out there. I've lost about 14 lbs since then, and I do look & feel better than I did. But it's been a constant battle -- one step forward, two steps back. It seems like I keep gaining & relosing the same three or four pounds, over and over again.

Losing weight at 30 was one thing, losing it at 48 is quite another. When I lost the weight at 30, I barely exercised at all. I did many the things they tell you to do, like drinking water, using low or non-fat dairy products and salad dressing, etc. And it worked.

These days, I'm still drinking my water & using low-fat products. (I even managed to avoid chocolate for NINE WHOLE WEEKS this spring when I was having problems with food reactions/hot flashes/anxiety/whatever the heck it was.) I don't deprive myself, but I try to eat healthy foods in reasonable quantities & minimize the treats (although I'm not always successful). I'm still not big on exercising, but I've taken yogalates classes, bought a pedometer, and tried conscientiously to walk more.

But it just hasn't had the same impact. I've had to come to the realization that I am never going to be the goal weight I was when I was 30, ever again. The size 8 Gap denim mini-skirt that I fit into for about five minutes back then, and then hung in my closet for the day when I could fit into it again, has long since gone to Goodwill. And that's OK.

But I'd still like to reach the top of my goal range. I think that's a more realistic goal weight for me these days, and still a healthy one. It would mean losing at least 25 more pounds, though, and I know it's much easier said than done. But I'm trying...

How did it make you feel when Stephanie's dad laughed at her being called a 'Moose'? Were you parents/guardians supportive of you during hard times/bullying/weight issues or did they just laugh at you like Stephanie’s father?

I felt badly for Stephanie, reading that. My parents weren't as uber-involved in the minute details of my life as today's "helicopter parents" seem to be. And if anyone got involved, it would most likely be my mother, who handled the minutae of our day to day lives, while my father worked.

But I did have some issues with bullies/mean girls, especially in my middle school years, & I can remember overhearing my mother saying to my father that she might have to have a talk with my chief tormentor's mother. Part of me thought, "No, no!" because I was afraid the bullying would only get worse. But it also felt good to know my mom believed there was a problem & didn't just dismiss my concerns -- and that she'd go to bat for me if she felt I needed the help. My sister & I were generally good students, but there were a few points during our school careers when my mother went to the school to talk to one of our teachers about concerns -- hers, ours or both.

In the author's note that precedes the rest of the book, Stephanie Klein writes: "I always hear that you have to let the past go, have to live in the moment, focus on your now. I'm able to move forward because I keep my past so close." I loved this statement -- not only because I, like Klein, am a packrat (who just finished going through a stack of boxes from my mother's crawl space that hadn't been opened in almost 30 years) -- but also because, so often, those of us in the ALI community are encouraged by well-meaning outsiders to "move on" with our lives. Thoughts? How does this statement apply to your own life, particularly regarding ALI? Do you find yourself wanting to keep your past close, or to let it go?

This was my question, and you can read about my crawl space exploits, here and here. ; ) As you can tell, I quite agree with Stephanie.

With regard to infertility & stillbirth -- as you can also tell, this is true for me in this part of my life as well. It's been 11 years since we lost Katie, 8 years since we made the decision to live childfree. But I still think about infertility & pregnancy loss issues every day, generally, as well as my own situation. I'm still hanging out on message boards for childless-not-by-choice women. I started this blog not quite two years ago. We're still facilitating the support group we attended after Katie's stillbirth, although we will be stepping down at the end of this year.

I wouldn't say that we haven't "moved on," because I think we have both come a long way since those dark days of 1998-2001. But I also think -- I know -- what happened to us changed us both forever. It is part of who we are now. It's impossible, for me, anyway, to completely "let go."

In the first chapter, Klein talks about her reluctance to gain weight during her twin pregnancy as a result of her childhood obesity. How have body image issues affected you during infertility? Pregnancy? Post-pregnancy?

Body image wasn't a problem for me during pregnancy (not that I remember anyway). I was so thrilled to be pregnant, after 2 & 1/2 years of trying to conceive. I took pride in my growing belly, and loved shopping for maternity clothes. I did find it a little disconcerting the day I needed my husband's help to put on a pair of socks, though, lol. ; ) And I did develop acne on my back. When my mother was here after we lost Katie, she used to dab the zits with peroxide for me to help dry them up, & then with vitamin E oil to heal the scars.

I know that many women have postpartum weight issues. I'm sorry. But you have a real live baby to show for it.

Try being postpartum after losing a baby. You're already feeling rotten enough about your body letting you down. You feel like cr@p, and you feel like you LOOK like cr@p. Not to mention that you may still look pregnant. If there's anything worse than being asked if you're pregnant when you're not, it's being asked if you're pregnant when not only are you not, you just lost a baby. And if there's anything worse than THAT, it's being asked if you're pregnant when you're not, you've lost a baby, you desperately want another one and you're finding you can't get pregnant again. (Been there, done that. Unfortunately.)

I've talked about postpartum weight issues with other babyloss mothers, in real life and online, who are also struggling to lose their pregnancy weight. One theory put forward was this: part of the reason it's so difficult for us to lose weight is that, somewhere in our subconscious, we may not really want to. Keeping the weight is a way of keeping our pregnancies, and our precious babies, with us. Letting go of the weight means letting go of our bodies the way they were when we had our babies with us. I dont' think that's the whole answer, but I think there may be a grain of truth in there somewhere.

Hop along to another stop on this blog tour by visiting the main list at Stirrup Queens. You can also sign up for the next book on this online book club: It Sucked, And Then I Cried by Heather Armstrong (aka Dooce).

Some more thoughts on my Columbine post

Dave Cullen, the author of "Columbine," was kind enough to stop by & comment on my recent post about his book. (This is the cool sort of thing that would never have happened in a pre-Internet world….) I had found his website when looking for stuff about the book -- hadn't checked it out too thoroughly, but went for a longer visit. There's all kinds of stuff there if you're interested in learning more about the book & his work on it -- including a promotional video trailer for the book. (Did you know that books, like movies, can have trailers?? I didn't.)

I watched the trailer, which is just under three minutes long, and right towards the very end, he observes that, many of the people affected by the Columbine tragedy felt "rushed to closure... and they resented it terribly," and adds, "The most important thing other communities can learn is, don't rush the healing."

I thought, "Touche!!" I thought of my own traumatic loss, & the other bereaved parents I know, in real life & online -- and how anxious everyone around us was/is to reassure themselves that everything is going to be OK. That we are OK. That we've "moved on." (Or, if we haven't, to hustle us along, so they won't have to worry about us anymore.)

Well, everything is not OK. Yes, it's 11 years later, for me, and there are many aspects of my life that are just fine (now), of course -- but it's never, ever going to be "OK" that my daughter was stillborn, or that my husband & I couldn't have the other children we very much wanted. Stillbirth and infertility changed me -- just as any life experience, good or bad, changes you, for better or for worse -- sometimes slowly and almost imperceptably, sometimes like a bolt of lightning out of the blue. Eventually, you learn to live with what happened, and with the new you and the new reality that is your life now.

But it's never OK. And the process of dealing with it never really ends, which is something that I think "outsiders" often fail to grasp. (In her fabulous stillbirth memoir An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination (it seems strange to write of a stillbirth memoir being "fabulous," but it really is…!), which we discussed in a session of the Barren B*tches Book Tour a few months ago, Elizabeth McCracken writes,"Closure is bullshit." As I wrote in my post then, I think it's my favourite line in the entire book.)

But on the other hand, I hate people thinking that I'm NOT OK -- that I am going to turn psycho on them or something, because of what happened to me -- that they have to tiptoe around me when it comes to the subject of our daughter and why we have no other children. I hate feeling pitied. I hate the silence, the fact that my daughter is never mentioned these days. Tash had a mind-blowing post the other day about silence among her family members and the truly ludicrous situation she found herself in as a result.

As I think I've written before, I'm not sure which is worse -- the silence, having people tiptoe around me and treating me like I'm this fragile creature -- or (more common these days, now that 11 years have passed) that they totally forget/ignore what happened and just assume that I'm fine with attending their baby showers & listening ad nauseum to their never-ending stories about pregnancy and toilet training and back to school traumas, or their little digs about how much time/money/flexibility dh & I must have (unspoken: because we don't have kids like them, of course…!). It's a fine balance, and I suspect I'll be going back and forth between the two sides for the rest of my life.

It's funny -- I initially debated whether I should write anything on this blog about the Columbine book, and here I've written two posts about it. At first glance, it wasn't really related to the issues I usually write about here. But the more I thought about it, Columbine was a story of grief & loss too. A different kind of grief & loss than I have experienced, of course -- but I believe there's a common thread that runs through grief experiences that connects the bereaved to one another, and gives us some measure of insight and understanding into other people's pain. (Not everyone feels this connection, perhaps, but I think many of us do.) Wordgirl had a beautiful post this week along these lines, about reading Alice Sebold's "The Lovely Bones" (another book in my gargantuan "to read" pile -- which I must get to before the movie comes out this December) and "the transferrability of trauma."

Oprah was going to do a show about Columbine on the 10th anniversary of the event this past April, featuring the book. The show was taped but, at the last minute, the producers made the decision not to show it. Ever. On the one hand, it was understandable -- there was already criticism of how the media were handling coverage of the 10-year mark, the whole question of giving publicity to the killers and exploiting people's pain. Emotions were raw. I know from my own experience how things that are OK on other days of the year are harder to deal with on or around "anniversary" dates, particularly the significant ones that end in a 0 or 5.

On the other hand, though, it seemed to me such a typical "head in the sand" reaction to dealing with a painful topic. Of course, the mass murder of children by children isn't easy or pleasant to think about or talk about. Neither are stillborn babies.

But if we're going to learn about why these things happen -- how to prevent these kinds of tragedies in the future, and and better deal with those who are suffering because of them -- whether "these things" are stillbirth, school shootings, planes flying into skyscrapers or whatever else life throws at us (and there will always be something) -- we need to be able to talk about them openly and honestly -- with compassion for what others are going through, and with respect for each other's choices and opinions.

Show & Tell, Part 2: It (also) came from the crawl space...

Second of my two-part Show & Tell this week (Part 1 is just below, here) No, I couldn't make up my mind just what to show you. So I'm showing everything I can think of, lol.

For last week's Show & Tell, I wrote about how we tackled the crawl space below my parents' house -- and some of the "buried treasure" we dug up.

The items I showed you then were sentimental items, ones that got the tears flowing. This week, I wanted to share a couple of "fun" (re) discoveries.


Like these:

When my sister & I were about 6 & 7 years old, living in northern Saskatchewan in the late 1960s, the one thing we wanted for Christmas was a set of walkie-talkies, like the ones we'd seen in the Eatons catalogue. I don't know why they piqued our interest, but they did. Maybe we'd been watching too many episodes of Get Smart (we used to fight over who got to be the glamorous Agent 99 when we acted out the episodes we'd seen), & this was the closest thing we could find to a shoephone. ; )

I remember standing outside the Santa Claus matinee at the little movie theatre that December, after watching a kiddie movie & getting a free bag of hard candy. (Admission: 35 cents. Popcorn: 10 cents.)(Am I sounding like my own grandmother or what?) We couldn't get near the Big Guy himself (& were probably too shy to talk to him anyway), but I vividly remember talking to his assistant, a female elf by the name of Mary Christmas, whom we had seen on the after-school show of the local CBC-TV affiliate (a TV star!!), and telling her this was what we wanted. She said maybe, if we were good. And there they were, underneath the tree on Christmas Day.

We had fun playing with the walkie-talkies for a few years, and then almost forgot about them, until the summer of 1975. We were going on a long-planned road trip all the way out to the west coast -- Vancouver & Victoria, via Edmonton, Jasper & Banff -- with the family that lived across the street. We were travellling in two cars and I had the brillian (if I do say so myself) idea that we should take a walkie-talkie in each car to communicate with each other (this being at least 20 years before any of us owned a cellphone).

And it worked out really well. If we wanted to talk to someone in the car ahead of us, we'd flick our headlights on & off, open the window (although it was probably already open, given that we did not have air-conditioned cars in those days & it was hotter than H-E-double-hockey-sticks driving across the Saskatchewan and Alberta prairie) and raise the antenna. Not a great way to carry on a long conversation, but good enough for a static-y "Let's stop for gas in the next town."


This slightly fuzzy photo shows the microphone from the very first cassette tape recorder we ever owned, circa about 1970. The tape recorder itself is long gone, but we found the microphone in a box with my sister's stuff.

The tape recorder was a source of endless entertainment for my sister & our friends (three sisters) from across the street (the same ones we went with to B.C.). We taped records for each other. In those pre-VCR/PVR/Tivo days, we would set the microphone up in front of the television set and tape our favourite TV shows, like the Partridge Family -- & them listen to them, over & over & over again. (There is one Partridge Family episode -- "Danny & the Mob" -- that I think I can still recite dialogue from.) Or, when we were visiting our American grandparents, and luxuriating in the multitude of TV channels there (i.e., more than the one we got, lol), we'd tape the songs & guests that we liked on American Bandstand. We taped commentary, a la Danny Gallivan on Hockey Night in Canada, while our dads faced off on our friends tabletop hockey game. And we taped shows of our own -- singing along to my girlfriend's guitar music, telling silly jokes, and giggling. Lots & lots of giggling.

Years later, I was visiting one of the girls who had lived across the street, and lo & behold, she produced one of our old show tapes. We listened to our younger selves, absolutely killing ourselves laughing. (She made me a copy -- which I really should transfer to a digital format...) Her young daughter -- who had had a video camera pointed at her all her life -- was quite bemused by it all & wanted to know why she couldn't WATCH us.

And this is me, doing my best Partridge Family imitation. (Truly, I do not always look this dorky -- even cropped -- and I debated about sharing this one, but I decided you needed to see it to understand what I was writing about.)

Long before karaoke machines, or Guitar Hero & Rock Band, my sister and our friends used to put Partridge Family, Archies & Osmonds albums on the record player and sing along, pretending we were the band. We decided that we needed microphones, and (real or even play microphones being either extremely rare &/or expensive in our part of the world at that time) we eventually found the ideal solution. We covered the handles of our skipping ropes with tinfoil & sang into those (they even had cords we could swish back & forth!!).

Believe it or not, I found a skipping rope, tin foil still covering the handle, coiled up inside of a round zippered doll's suitcase -- like the round suitcase Tracy Partridge used to carry in promotional photos.

To see what others are showing & telling this week, hop over here.

Show & Tell, Part 1: Look what followed me home...

This week's Show & Tell comes in two parts. Yes, when I'm on a roll, I'm on a roll. ; ) This is Part 1. Part 2 appears just above this post, here.

My belated thanks to all of you who sent comments & good thoughts for me, dh & Katie on Aug. 5-7. We both really appreciated it.

I kept myself busy all day Friday, cleaning house (so I wouldn't have to do it on Saturday). After having my shower, I spent some quiet time going through Katie's things & re-reading my blog entries from last year that told her story. After dh got home, we ordered in Chinese (as we did when we got home from the hospital, 11 years prior). And then we went to the market, got some pink roses, and headed to the cemetery.

Afterwards, we decided to head to the local megabookstore for a Starbucks treat & a browse.

And I found THIS little guy:



A soft, fuzzy, cuddly Classic Pooh teddy bear. A whole display of them, actually, along with Classic Eeoyores and Classic Piglets, and copies of Pooh story collections (which I have).

Katie's nursery was to have been decorated in Classic Pooh -- we have a quilt, bumper pads, curtain vallance & matching wallpaper border, bought on sale at Sears in late July 1998 -- among the very few baby items that we bought during my rollercoaster pregnancy. And in the years since then, we've added to our Classic Pooh collection.

But of course, times change and baby fashions change, and Classic Pooh has fallen somewhat out of favour.

Needless to say, I simply could not resist. : ) It just seemed like fate that I would find a whole pile of Classic Pooh stuff on Katie's special day.
I wasn't quite sure what I would do with it or where I would put it when we got home. But when I walked into my bedroom, I instantly knew where Pooh should go.

I have two other (Gund) teddy bears sitting on our bed. I bought one for my annual workplace Christmas teddy bear drive some years ago. He was just so cute I couldn't resist buying a second one for myself. A few years later, I couldn't resist buying another, smaller Gund bear.

Dh once asked me if the two teddys were representative of me & him. I never really thought of it that way. I did always think of them as guardians of the house while we were away. ; ) I also didn't think of it until later, but they reminded me of Mr. Bear and Little Bear in Dare Wright's book The Lonely Doll, which I read & loved as a child, but had forgotten about, until I read an article about the author in Vanity Fair several years ago.

Anyway, the twosome is now a threesome. Maybe I AM unconsciously trying to recreate our little family??


This wasn't the first time I found comfort in the bookstore on August 7. On that day in 2004, we spent the day in much the same way, heading to the bookstore after visiting the cemetery. As I wrote in a post on a childless living board I frequent:

"... (a mocha frappucino is a great mood lifter, lol). They always play music in the store, of course, & while I was browsing, they started playing Simon & Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water," which I have always loved & always gives me the chills. It just seemed so appropriate for the day! Then, after that song ended, they started into "Stand by Me." It just kept going: the next song after that was "Lean on Me," & then a great sort of bluesy soul song called "Have a Little Faith in Me" (VanMorrison? Joe Cocker?). And as we left the store, they were playing "I Will Remember You" by Sarah McLauchlin (sp?). I just couldn't believe it -- it was like it was tailor-made listening for me. I got teary & then I started to laugh as I listened. Whoever it was that was responsible for the playlist, thanks!!"

To see what others are showing & telling this week, hop over here.