The other morning, early in the morning when Abby’s kicks awaken me, I lay in bed and let my thoughts scurry the way I used to run my fingers along a row of musty books at the library, randomly picking one out, reading the inside flap only to pluck another one a few seconds later.  This particular morning, I was thinking of this new life I’m in now.   Life after loss.  And the picture of a house came vividly in my mind:

my new house, in which I dwell.

It is a large house, with many rooms.  There are dark rooms and light rooms.  Rooms with windows to see out to the future, and dark cellar rooms, with locks that stick and cobwebbed corners.  There are rooms with God and rooms of great emptiness.  Rooms with music and laughter and rooms with endless crying.  There are bitter rooms and rooms with forgiveness.  Rooms with life and rooms with death. 

Each day, I wander about this house, sometimes spending most of my day in one room, and sometimes aimlessly traveling to many rooms in the span of one conversation.   People are allowed to visit my house, but they don’t live here.  I allow them into some rooms, and lock them out of others.  They find it cumbersome to visit long, as if the house pulls their life-breath away.

I think, a few times anyway, I’ve left this new house.  Ventured out into the blinding world like emerging from a darkened theatre.  The world seems to run at a different speed than I do now.  It’s overexposed, and I squint my eyes to make out the details.  The sound is not quite right.  Too loud at times.  Too quiet at times.  The people speak a foreign language.  I don’t hear their words, only the rapid cadence of  their speech.  It is disorienting and dizzying to me now that I’ve moved homes.  I knew this world once.  And though it seems familiar to me, in once-dreamt type of way, I’m a foreigner in it now.

My new house sits away from the world, deep in a valley.  I’m still discovering the hidden doors and secret passageways here.  Sometimes by accident, I open a closet and find a piece of joy or peek into a corner and see a demon’s shadow.   I hate this house in many ways.  It is my prison, but it’s also my haven. 

 It is, after all, where Will is.

As time passes, as it always does, I’ll do as all the other parents of lost children do:  I’ll learn the language of the world again.  I’ll shield my eyes from the sun and reacclimate to its pace. I’ll pass, quite well, for a regular person. 

But every night, no matter how many winters have melted and summers have cooled, (just as every child-lost parent before me) I’ll retreat back to this house again.  My house where Will is,

and remember that little boy who almost was born, and visit with him there,

giggling in his would-be room.