Unknowable
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I’m visiting my best friend from university, in the town where we first met in dorms and then lived together in a series of ramshackle old houses. We sit in her not-so-ramshackle old house, all grown up and laughing at what idiots we were, reminiscing about all the times we narrowly escaped trouble and — not laughing as much — the times we didn’t. I have known her since we were eighteen years old and we have been through everything together, good and bad: school, travel, bad boyfriends, good boyfriends, the loss of a parent, marriage, divorce, the birth of our children, miscarriage, stillbirth, cancer. The list goes on, but we sit in her living room and laugh and laugh and laugh and we drive through the streets of this town I called home for all of the years where I really grew up and there we are, everywhere, our past selves, young and idiotic and glorious. Also everywhere: the ghost of a girl who will never know the kind of friendship I’ve known, never feel the freedom of being twenty and wild and eager for it all or the amazement of being fifty and having lived through it and not being done.
In January, my little gone girl would be turning thirteen years old. In a few weeks, her older sister will turn sixteen. These birthdays feel momentous. Sweet sixteen and a newly-minted teen. Her sister has submitted an exceptionally organized birthday and Christmas list and as I follow the links she’s provided to lip tints and blushes, bangles and bags, I wonder where their lists would have intersected and where they would diverge. I am constantly amazed at how different my eldest daughter is from me. Self-assured, whip-smart and assertive, with a liking for glamour and a pronounced addiction to Sephora, she leaves the house each morning looking like the teenagers I was more than a little bit afraid of when I was her age. It’s knowing how different she is from anything I could have imagined when I was pregnant with her, and how perfectly her those differences make her, that makes me realize there is nothing I can know about my second daughter; there is really no way to imagine what she would have been like, what she would have loved, what she would have wanted from her life, how she would have moved through it. She is the profoundest mystery of my life, and I feel this deeply this season as the teen milestones approach. I am so, so far from that tiny still baby I held in my arms for a few short hours and I will never know what could have been, had everything been different.
Over time, the loss gets easier in some ways. The pain is not as acute. It doesn’t sit as heavily. But then sometimes you see all at once how much more loss has piled up over time. The loss of all the potential girls and women she could have been, might have known, might have loved, and the countless unknown people who have lost something by never knowing, never having been loved by, that girl, that woman who might have been.
I stand on the train platform on my way home to my family and I think of that movie, Sliding Doors, and the idea that one tiny decision could determine how everything else transpires.
What if, what if, what if. Every loss parent knows this refrain.
The train doors open and people stream past. I imagine her slipping through the crowd, about to turn thirteen, excited by the new freedom she has to explore the city with her friends, giggling and clutching each other’s arms. She wouldn’t notice a middle-aged woman waiting to board the train, wouldn’t catch the wistful glance, the wonder, the what ifs. She’d flounce off with her friends, oblivious, herself, absorbed in the world she’s building around herself every day. Exactly how things should have been, if.
What would you most like to know about the baby you’re missing?