Solstice Shadows

On the day sunlight stretches to its fullest into the day, a shadow of a toddling baby girl laughing at the idea of sitting still for the picture gathers by my baby, two months old, holding up his wobbly head to look at me holding a camera. The baby girl lives only in my imagination. She never got to be more than a premature infant before all we had left were ashes we scattered on this very hill.

Another shadow, this time of a six-year-old, gathers by his toddler brother. This boy's hair is no longer blond, and his boyish features obscure the resemblance to the baby he never got to be. His living toddling brother looks so much like him- or like I imagine he would look at least. On this day, the six-year-old's due date, these two children are written over each other, the dead shadowing the living. And the new baby is shadowed as well, on the six-year-old's due date, on the little girl's grave.

Compounding grief draws around and beneath my real life, offering ethereal glimpses of what might have been, but even that shadowy picture is drawn in love. The love shapes these memories of loss upon loss into ghosts of laughter and play. I resent the loss of that laughter and play still, while I hold onto a world where the echoes of what never got to be brings moments of joy rather than pain. I greet the ghosts while holding on tight to the sunlit beauty of my living children. Shadows and sunlight, resentment and joy. And wonder in the thin places on the thin days.