You have to endure it.

I had thought that returning to work may help me move forward.  I was wrong.  Very wrong.  My job is going through a stressful season.  I dont sleep at night because i am stressed about work. My mind and emotions are consumed with the death of my daughter, yet i am forced to push it aside because i have work work work.  Every night I breakdown because I dont have the mental or emotional capacity to balance both.  You know that crazy thing your brain does when you've had too much coffee?  You know you must eat something, drink a big glass of water, open a window.....something.  That is my brain everyday.  I feel like an idiot because im thinking about so many things at once, when really, my main thought is, "I want to hold my daughter." In all honesty, I feel like I'm on the edge of entering Crazy Town.  All this to say.....I havent had the ability to put into words this latest part of my journey. 

A blog that I follow referenced an excerpt from an advice columnist name Sugar.  Someone had written to Sugar about the stillbirth of their daughter.  I have read this excerpt everyday since she posted it.  It puts into words what I cant, and has given me hope that I havent yet felt.  

"Here's just some of it...

"Though we live in a time and place and culture that tries to tell us otherwise, suffering is what happens when truly horrible things happen to us.

Don’t listen to those people who suggest you should be “over” your daughter’s death by now. The people who squawk the loudest about such things have almost never had to get over any thing. Or at least not any thing that was genuinely, mind-fuckingly, soul-crushingly life altering. Some of those people believe they’re being helpful by minimizing your pain. Others are scared of the intensity of your loss and so they use their words to push your grief away. Many of those people love you and are worthy of your love, but they are not the people who will be helpful to you when it comes to healing the pain of your daughter’s death.

They live on Planet Earth. You live on Planet My Baby Died.

It seems to me that you feel like you’re all alone there. You aren’t. There are women reading this right now who have tears in their eyes. There are women who have spent their days chanting daughter, daughter or son, son silently to themselves. Women who have been privately tormented about the things they did or didn’t do that they fear caused the deaths of their babies. You need to find those women, darling. They’re your tribe.

I know because I’ve lived on a few planets that aren’t Planet Earth myself.

The healing power of even the most microscopic exchange with someone who knows in a flash precisely what you’re talking about because she experienced that thing too cannot be over-estimated. Call your local hospitals and birth centers and inquire about support groups for people who’ve lost babies at or before or shortly after birth. Read Elizabeth McCracken’s memoir An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination. Find online communities where you can have conversations with people during which you don’t have to pretend a thing.

...

This is how you get unstuck, Stuck. You reach. Not so you can walk away from the daughter you loved, but so you can live the life that is yours—the one that includes the sad loss of your daughter, but is not arrested by it. The one that eventually leads you to a place in which you not only grieve her, but also feel lucky to have had the privilege of loving her. That place of true healing is a fierce place. It’s a giant place. It’s a place of monstrous beauty and endless dark and glimmering light. And you have to work really, really, really fucking hard to get there, but you can do it, honey. You’re a woman who can travel that far. I know it.

...

You will never stop loving your daughter. You will never forget her. You will always know her name. But she will always be dead. Nobody can intervene and make that right and nobody will. Nobody can take it back with silence or push it away with words. Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can’t cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It’s just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live though it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal. Therapists and friends and other people who live on Planet My Baby Died can help you along the way, but the healing—the genuine healing, the actual real deal down-on-your-knees-in-the-mud change—is entirely and absolutely up to you..."

          Dear Sugar: July 15, 2010--How You Get Unstuck

I miss her.  I miss myself.  I cant be afraid to move forward from this sorrow.  She is not there.