Baby X
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Today’s guest post is by Kat, who writes, by way of introduction: I can't bring myself to give them a name, but they will be forever branded into my heart as Baby X. Feeling the full, rough, wool blanket of new grief, with slivers of hope interwoven between the threads.
As a teenager, I hated algebra.
I could never wrap my head around the equations,
And the worst part was when I had to
Solve for x.
An unknown quantity or value,
Which could also be replaced by a letter, symbol
Or name.
Decades later, in the hum and sickliness of the dimly lit urgent care
My teacher, now a phlebotomist tells me my math was yet again wrong
And I didn’t correctly
Solve for x.
It didn’t matter if I could prove my work was right -
At least, at one point it had been.
And the familiar shame-tears of thinking you had read all the books
And memorized the formulas
Started welling up, but this time,
X is a person.
And the formula is life.
How do you grieve an unknown variable?
How do you grieve an unknown variable? There are so many posts on this site that address this question, and still we will keep asking it. Babyloss is different than many other types of loss in this way, that we know so little about someone we miss so deeply. How do you grieve an unknown variable?