Grief

This is a hard post for me to write. And I don't want to write it. But I NEED to write it because if I don't write it, I might lose my mind a little bit.

I might lose my mind briefly anyway.

It is impossible for me to believe that in 2008, in a fine hospital, full of fine doctors, a woman can die from complications of pregnancy and birth.

But that is what has happened.

H~ was a college girlfriend. She was not one of my Girlfriends (capital G), not one of the women on whom I rely today. But, she was a Girlfriend to some of my Girlfriends, and right now my heart is breaking for her husband, for her baby who will never know her mother, and for my Girlfriends who have lost one of THEIR Girlfriends.

H~ and I were sorority sisters and we had a lot of classes together, and she made me laugh and I liked sitting and talking with her in the cafeteria.

It has been almost 8 years since I saw her last.

It does not make it easier, those eight years of absence, for me to wrap my head around her death. Her insane, tragic, inexplicable death. Her death is something I am having a really hard time accepting as real.

H~ was an athlete in college. As I sat here, trying to conjure specific memories of her, smiling and blond and laughing, I remember watching her get ready for a swim meet. She was so strong. I mean, really, physically - she was all muscle - she was fast. She was very, very fast in the pool.

How is possible, how is fair, how is it POSSIBLE - for someone so strong to be torn from her family this way? She had a baby. She died. It's not right. It's NOT possible. Except that it must be possible, because it happened.

I want to believe that she is not dead, I want to believe that she, like all new mothers, is sore and overwhelmed and desperate for sleep. I want to believe that she is struggling with a gigantic stroller baby seat combo in the Michigan snow. I want to believe these things, but none of them is true.

But the thing that is true - that she is gone - is too horrible for me to comprehend.