In honor of Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Day, I want to share this poem I wrote a few weeks ago after the three year anniversary of our loss.
Sometimes I think back to my pre-loss opinions, that “stuff like this happens and you move on” and the foolish idea I had early on that we would basically “keep it to ourselves” …and then I look at where I am now, and wondered if maybe, at three years, I’d be more “over it” if I’d followed conventional (old, faulty) thinking and just kept quiet and ‘put it behind me’…
That was my thought when I sat down to write this poem, which practically fell out of me. But oddly, the idea that that would have been a better way to deal with it, I honestly couldn’t even connect enough words to express that thought, because it is so unrealistic.
The poem isn’t perfect. I’m nobody’s poet. And it might have echoes of Dr. Seuss in it’s rhythms, but whatever.
If you like it and it means something to you, please let me know.
I wonder how it’d be different
I wonder how it’d be different if I hadn’t shared their names
If I’d kept them to myself and I hadn’t shared my pain
I wonder how it’d be different if I’d kept them to myself
If I’d hid all of my sorrow and I’d never asked for help.
Now at three years later would I still think of them daily
Would I see them in the little things
and hear their names in passing winds.
How would things be different If I’d never Shared their names?
Would the word “twins” make me cringe inside the way I do today.
Or would it be more obvious and would my tears betray
Or maybe it’d be different, I’d hardly think of them myself.
They’d be locked up safe inside of me if I’d never asked for help.
People would have forgotten, or they’d speak in whispered tone,
about the girl I once was, before my broken home.
At least this way I love them in the best way that I know.
To put my heart out on the line so maybe I can show
These losses they don’t disappear and there’s pain inside our hearts
And there’s no harm in acknowledging these slightly broken parts.
They make us strong, they make us proud they make us who we are.
They’re a symbol of the love we have and like a badge or scar
It is my choice to show the world this love I have inside
for the gift I have that changed my life, despite the tears I cried.
How would things be different If I’d never Shared their names?
-Tova Gold
Their Hand Painted Grave Markers.
