Have you seen that Subaru commercial with the little girl and dad on the girl’s first day of kindergarten?

The first time I saw it, my world stopped spinning for a moment. That little girl. She looked so much like what I dream Cora would look like.

Screenshot of a frame of the commercial.

Last night the commercial came on while my husband and I were watching TV and he turned to me and said the same thing. The little girl reminded him of Cora.

Maybe it was that image that lead to my experience later that night.

A few hours later and we climbed into bed. Both dogs jumped up after and as usual our queen size bed felt more like a twin. We’re not little people and with two dogs and the mountain of pillows I keep, the bed gets cramped.

Soon I could hear my husband softly snoring, but I couldn’t sleep. I was tucked facing the middle of the bed and as has happened, I could feel the spot where she is supposed to be. I could imagine her sneaking into our bed in the middle of the night after a nightmare.

I could feel her there. One of those feelings you can’t put into words. I stayed in the moment as much as possible and listened to my body. I could feel our little Cora, in the form of the toddler she would be now all curled up next to my arm. Soon my arms and chest started to ache from the pain of not having her in them.

All the sudden, our bed felt like it spanned the Sahara desert. So much empty space.

It was a happy-sad moment. I felt so incredibly close to her. I felt the mother-daughter bond. The bond that transcends anything else I’ve ever known. I was happy to have her in my heart in that moment. I was also mournful over the fact that she should be there in body, not just in spirit.

In the inspired blog posts I write about her.

She lives.

On the lips of those that speak her name.

She lives.

Because of the babies she’s saved.

She lives on.

What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us;
what we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal.
-Albert Pike

A part of her never left. The love and beauty she brought this world didn’t just go away.

In my heart.

She lives on ever so strongly.

Love is stronger than death even though
it can’t stop death from happening,
but no matter how hard death tries
it can’t separate people from love.
It can’t take away our memories either.
In the end, life is stronger than death.
-unknown

In the loving work I do in her name.

She lives.

Unable are the loved to die. For love is immortality.  - Emily Dickinson

Rather you live to be 101, are here for only five days or never take a breath outside of your mother’s womb, your time spent on this Earth lasts forever. A part of you stays, living on in the minds and hearts of those that knew you.

Death isn’t the ending, its the start of a new chapter of the same book. Our babies will always be our babies. I believe our babies have always been our babies.

This weekend as late spring snow flakes fall outside, I’ve been enjoying what is hopefully the last week of winter hibernation watching the NCAA basketball tournament (Go Hoosiers).

My leg, which has been much, much better, hurt this weekend for some reason, so I took it easy and got in the mood to create.

Someone pull me away from my image editor!

This is by far my favorite:

I also made some images to explain to friends/family what this journey is like, in anticipation of the release of the second release of my eBook, “When Your Friend’s Baby Dies.” 

And for my heart family:

The photos are from Flickr (Creative commons, permission to modify) and text and design done by me. You are free to share, as long as you don’t add anything or crop anything out.

Chances are if you’ve spent any time on the Internet searching for information about life after the loss of a baby, you’ve seen my friend Franchesca’s work. She’s created so many beautiful resources and is a constant source of inspiration for me personally.

Last month, she sent me a copy of her new book, “Celebrating Pregnancy Again.” Since I’m not currently pregnant, I’m going to hold out on my review and thoughts, but wanted you to hear about this amazing book from her.

Kristine: Can you give us an overview of your book, “Celebrating Pregnancy Again?” 

Fran: Yes! And thank you so much for this opportunity to share my book! This book was born out of a harsh realization in my second rainbow pregnancy with my second daughter, that I could barely remember my first rainbow pregnancy with my son. There was so much fear and anxiety present while carrying my son, who was born almost a year after losing our first. The book is written in a way to encourage bereaved mothers in their subsequent pregnancies to enjoy every moment, in spite of the fear, the anxiety, and the unknown of the future. It can also be an eye opener for family and friends of the expecting, and bereaved mother as well, as so few can truly relate to this unique and bittersweet journey.

Kristine: What were some of the things you did to celebrate your rainbow pregnancies?

Fran: I actually devoted a whole chapter on ideas of ways to celebrate your pregnancy after loss, for each trimester. Some of the ways I was able to celebrate my rainbow pregnancies was letting family and friends throw a baby shower for me (this was extremely hard the first go around, and we actually chose to wait until our son made a safe arrival to do this), taking maternity photos, taking a lot of ‘bump’ photos with my last pregnancy, talking and singing to them in the womb, and creating a ‘dream’ board for the future nursery, just to name a few.

Kristine: What’s the one thing you must want readers to walk away from after reading your book? 

Fran: You deserve to enjoy, and even celebrate, this beautiful time with your new baby, in spite of what others might think or believe. Celebrating your new baby does not mean you have forgotten your lost child, it only means you are taking one step toward healing and happiness, and that is a beautiful, moving thing.

Kristine: You’re an inspiration to thousands of grieving mothers, can you talk about some of your other projects and how they came about?

Fran: Oh goodness, it is humbling to think about it that way. When my daughter took her last breathe as I held her for the first and last time, almost four years ago, that moment changed everything about the direction my life was going. I wanted nothing more in life, than to find at least one other grieving mama and let her know she wasn’t alone, because I felt alone. I couldn’t believe women had been burying their children while life was going so casually for me all this time, and I never knew about it – not really anyway. I was first inspired by the beautiful Carly Marie, who devotes so much of her life for this community. I realized that healing comes from refocusing your pain, not forgetting it or trying to make it go away. I have always been a little artsy and found so much healing in creating. I began doing design work for baby loss charities, and  blog designs for bereaved mommy bloggers. I also gathered up some of my favorite quotes on loss and healing and made greeting cards with Carly on our card line website, and canvases in my shop. I feel like my work is my way of mothering Jenna. I can’t make her bed, or take her shopping for her first pair of ballet shoes. I can’t pull her hair into curly hair pigtails, or watch The Little Mermaid with her for the first time, but I can make sure her name lives on, and share her story with every willing listener.

Kristine here again butting in because Fran is being totally humble and sweet. She’s truly a leader and inspiration in this community. She writes one of the most highly read blogs in the baby loss community, is the editor and founder of a hugely successful magazine, Still Standing, creates the most beautiful art in her shop, and that’s just the tip of the ice berg. Thanks for being you Fran. 

Kristine: Where can people buy your book?

It is available on Paperback, Kindle and PDF.

Our problematic kitchen faucet that’s acted up since we moved in to this home has turned into a full blown out headache this week. My husband woke me up and drug me out of bed one morning to a kitchen counter and floor soaked with water. I mopped up the mess and he made a contraption of a series of cups and towels to get us through to the weekend when we could buy a new one and he could fix it.

It’s been a source of stress all week. Hoping it’s not causing permanent damage. Dealing with constant towel changes, excess water mop up and cup emptying.

I can’t complain. Today is World Water Day. We are lucky to have clean water to waste. We are lucky that our biggest problem is an excess of clean water spilling on to the counter top.

Across the world, 783 million people don’t have access to clean water to drink. I’m sure they’d love to have our leaky faucet.

That breaks down to 11 percent of the world’s population lacking water. Something we all take for granted.

The lack of clean water, coupled with poor sanitation, leads to 2,000 child deaths every single day. That’s 2,000 families every single day losing their child because they didn’t have clean water.

Nonprofit Water Aid hopes to change that. The organization helps communities around the world plan, build and manage their own water supplies, saving and transforming lives.

I watched my baby die from something that turned out to be preventable, but never did my baby suffer because she lacked access to basic human needs (which should be a right for every human). Can you imagine watching your baby slowly die because she didn’t have clean water?

I’m a member of Mom Bloggers for Social Good Global Team of 200, you can read more posts about World Water day here.

I first noticed it a few months ago when a mega-popular blogger included video with children from an entire extra-curricular class.

I was reading the post about the class complete with cute pictures of the blogger’s child participating and the thought popped into my head, surely the video will only be focused on the blogger’s child.

It wasn’t. Children from the entire class could be seen. This blog I estimate gets tens of thousands of hits A DAY. I can’t say the blogger did not ask for permission to upload the video and images of other children, so I’m not taking him or her to task or using it as anything other than an opening for conversation.

I’m just not comfortable with the idea of pictures and videos of stranger’s or acquaintance’s children being uploaded on the Internet. It’s grey area to upload a class photo or something to your personal, private Facebook, but some of these parenting blogs and parent’s social media accounts get millions of hits a month and have tens of thousands of followers.

Almost always, you can piece together enough about the blogger to figure out a whole lot of personal data, like where their child goes to school, their schedules, even their addresses. It’s one conversation to have about the risks and privacy issues of the blogger’s children. I think ultimately that’s a decision each blogger has to make.

However, if those details can be figured out about their child, someone could quickly figure the school and neighborhood where the kid in the back of the community pool picture you took and uploaded for your thousands of Instagram followers to see lives.

This has been on my mind for weeks. Every time I see what appears to be “stranger kids” on social media accounts and blogs, I cringe. It’s just not okay, in my mind.

Sure, some of the parents probably don’t care if their child appears in photos on other people’s blogs and social media accounts. In some cases, the blogger might have asked permission. I do hope that the blogger was clear that their blog reaches hundreds of thousands of strangers, and not just her mom and dad.

I don’t know what legal issues surround sharing these types of images, if any it’s possible the law hasn’t caught up to technology.

I’ve watched enough Law and Order: SVU to have lots of gross images in my mind about the ways these images could be potentially used by really disgusting people.

I just know I wouldn’t want my child in a swim suit plastered across the Internet without my knowledge.

Am I being paranoid? How do we reconcile sharing cute photos of our own children that might include other children? (You can weigh in on my Facebook page, comments are closed here permanently.)

Tonight I flipped through all the posts I’ve written on this blog looking for posts about “Cora’s Law” for that shiny new button on the sidebar. I wanted to categorize them and then link to the category on the sidebar for my readers to read about the law and how it came about if interested.

Looking at all those old posts brought back all those good emotions–good and bad. You know what? Mainly good. It’s amazing to see what my little girl has done and to remember all I’ve done out of love for her.

I decided to share so we could smile, weep and sigh together.

I love blogging. I love having a record of this journey. I love that I poured so much of myself into these posts. I remember crying hysterically while writing many of them. Others, like the post I wrote after learning a bill was going to be introduced mandating pulse oximetry screening for newborns in Indiana, my hands and body shook with happiness and awe shooting out of my finger tips.

The header of this blog when it was named “Instructions Are Not Included.” Feel free to giggle. It’s ridiculous.

I started this blog on blogger as my pregnancy blog. I posted just a few times, and wasn’t that into it. I named the blog “Instructions Are Not Included” because before giving birth to Cora, I’d never even changed a newborns diaper. I was feeling completely lost about all things baby. My first post was in the middle of my second trimester, and I talked about still feeling exhaustion (that whole second trimester full of energy thing didn’t happen for me). I was 23 weeks pregnant with Cora.

Holy scary cankles, right? It was awesome though–Ben rubbed my feet daily!

One of my next literary masterpieces (hope you can sense the sarcasm) was a post about pregnancy cankles. I even posted and took a picture. To this day, this post brings people to this blog by the weirdest search terms.  I was about 24 weeks pregnant.

Ben and Reggie putting together Cora’s crib. I think I was about 30 weeks pregnant.

Be still my heart. I’ll never forget watching Ben put the crib together. It was just one of *those* moments. A snapshot of life I’ll never forget. Unfortunately, if you follow the link, it just takes you to a page that won’t load. I put up the story on a now defunct social media site called Whrll. I dug up one of the snapshots to show you above.

Thanks to Cora, the EMAB birth plan includes heart defect screening!

I don’t even remember writing this post, but wish I could pop myself over the head and say “Yes, you do need a birth plan! And it should include pulse ox screening.” I talked about what a birth plan is, and how I was researching. The post basically ends with me saying I was going to finish up some research and talk to my doctor first. I wish I hadn’t! She told me she hated birth plans and that doctors and nurses ignored them. Grrrr…

My last post before Cora died was written a month before her due date, or three weeks before she came and was about packing my hospital back. I’m choking back tears right now.

I think this is a good place to stop, as the tears well in my eyes and the length of this post grows. I’ll call this part 1 and post the rest of the flash back, as seen through my words on this blog, in the next week.

Sigh. If only I’d known…

For how openly I’ve shared on this blog about my private life and thoughts, I’ve suddenly found myself a bit timid. I started to write about this the other day and deleted the post. However, this is part of Cora’s story.

I finally feel like we’re making real steps to adding another baby to our family. My husband landed a bona fide 8 to 5 job, and it’s done wonders for our family.

I get up with him and clean and cook and act like a grown up.

Our schedules and lives were in such disarray for so long after Cora died, I didn’t feel like we should even attempt to have a child.

We talked about what we needed to do first, but never made any real steps. It’s so nice to be making those steps now. Now it’s time to focus on my health–mental, physical and spiritual.

Having another child, preparing to have another child and even thinking about it are going to take up a lot of who I am. I always knew that when I became pregnant I’d have to step back a bit from advocacy and community work. I just didn’t realize that I’d have to do it in the preparing stages.

It’s extremely stressful and well, dark, at times to pour myself into saving other babies. I’ll continue to do that for the rest of my life, but sometimes, I have to seek the light.

As my family enters a new phase, now is one of those times.

There’s much work to be done.

I dream of having another baby often. Usually in the dream, the baby dies.

This week, I had a dream that the baby lived. I was full of fear, and kept begging the doctors to keep me in the hospital longer than five days. But, the baby (who in my dream was like three feet tall–gotta love dreams) lived.

The time will never be perfect, but I think we’re getting close. So close, I can almost smell that delicious new baby smell.

I alternate between pushing visions of whom Cora would be today out of my head and embracing them as moments to still mother her.

Three years out from her loss, and I’m learning so much through my grief.

In America, we’re taught that grief is something to get over. If people spend too much time or talk about it too much, they’re “lingering” or  ”stuck.”

Opening up and finding a way to grieve openly and honestly has been a challenging road.

When my dad died when I was a little girl, I thought it was bad to talk about the loss. I never wanted to use it as an excuse. I mimicked the societal expectations around bereavement.

I didn’t realize it was okay to incorporate and embrace my grief, and honor his life, in my every day life. I didn’t realize grief went much deeper than just being sad. I didn’t realize it changed who we were, and not in bad ways. I didn’t realize that it was a moving concept, and not a set target. I didn’t know it was something I’d carry around with me always, and that I didn’t need to be ashamed.

I thought so much of my behavior was “bad” or meant that I wasn’t “coping well.” I didn’t know it’s okay to go deep into the heart of my loss .

I was baking brownies yesterday. I’m not much of a baker, at all, so it’s rare. My late grandmother on the other hand, was a huge baker. She used to make cookies or a cake or brownies or something every single day.

As I whipped together the ingredients, I thought of her. I imagined her baking next to me, taking the spoon from my hand and saying, “let me do it” because she always liked to add her extras. In that moment, she lived.

It wasn’t sad. It wasn’t something to fear. It felt normal. It’s my way of dealing with grief now. Including the people I’ve lost in my present moment.

As a Buddhist, I strive to be present in the moment at all times. I practice gently pushing aside other thoughts and emotions and just focusing on the here and now. It doesn’t always happen. In fact, I live “in my head” just as much if not more than most folks I suspect.

When I incorporate my lost loved ones into my present moment, without judgement or emotion, I incorporate their loss in a genuine way into my present existence.

If you live in Indiana, no doubt you’re aware the Indiana University basketball team is tearing things up this year. Ranked number one for most of the year, they won the Big Ten championship last week.

I’ve talked about it before on this blog, but when I was pregnant with Cora, I was so excited to take her to my alma mater. To eventually take her to games. To dress her up on game day.

I used to be the queen of all IU basketball fans. I must admit my enthusiasm over the past few years dropped, but telling Cora about my school, watching the games with her, it was a tradition and memory I couldn’t wait to make.

Sunday, IU played Michigan. It was an incredible game, with everything coming down to the final possessions. When the basketball rolled out of the hoop after a Michigan failed game-winning shot, I screamed and jumped so yelled Ben told me the neighbors were going to call the police.

In my mind, Cora was there. She wouldn’t have known what was going on, but she would have gotten excited because mommy was excited. She was with me in that moment.

I pulled this from the bag of Cora’s laundry I never washed. I could still smell her.

When I can include my lost loved ones in the moment without trying to push down the thought because it’s too difficult, I’m healing. I’ll never be whole, but I’m leaving to live and grieve authentically.

For everyone else, healing after my daughter’s death started a few months after she died. They went on with their lives. They viewed her death as the singular event that happened that awful December morning.

I live her death every day.

I allowed myself a pity party with my husband a few weeks ago. We sat and talked about everything that’s happened since she died three years ago.

One things for certain, our lives now are much different than they would have been if she’d lived.

Three months to the day she died my husband broke a bone in his ankle so badly at one point doctors said he’d never walk. Later they said he’d always need crutches. We were a thousand miles away from home, on a trip we’d never been on had she lived. I know because it should have fallen smack in the middle of my husband’s semester.

He was getting straight As before she died.

The next semester began and he couldn’t concentrate and had to take the semester off.

I couldn’t concentrate for much good at all. I couldn’t even cook dinner for months and months. I still remember the first time I was able to focus on an entire television show–six months after my daughter died.

I feel like that day started us on a path of doom some days.

When your baby dies, it smashes your entire life. Shreds it into pieces. Leaves you in a whirlwind of trauma and a shell of what you once were.

Cora changed my life for good in so many ways. I’d still go through it all a day.

But sometimes I look at around at all the pieces I still need to glue back together and get overwhelmed.

It truly is one step forward, two steps back.

The last few months have slipped us backwards.

Now it’s time to keep walking.