I have no answers

It's been an unnerving week. So many losses; tiny little lives that have come and gone in the blink of an eye.

None of them mine, by the way. But each of them touched my life in a way that has surprised me. I thought I was mostly resistant to other people's sorrow, hardened by a thick protective shell that enabled me to express sympathy without having the unpleasant side-effect of absorbing any of their pain.

But I guess I'm not. Or not anymore, anyway. Maybe I'm strong enough to allow other people's pain in now. Or maybe I'm too weak to fight it off. I don't know.

But I do know I'm grieving right along with two dear friends as well as a total stranger who contacted me through my website. Three babies lost in one week.

I sometimes wonder about those little souls and what they feel. If you believe, like I do, that life begins at conception, then those little souls that lived for a matter of weeks or days were real people whose earthly lives will never be more than just those few precious moments.

What is that like? What is heaven to them when they haven't known anything at all of earth?

I complain about people with those moronic bluetooth phone things stuck in their ears, and people who don't signal lane changes, and dog owners who don't properly pick up their dog's poo (a story for another blog), and yet my life is more beautiful, more full, and more complete - even in its sorrow and imperfection - than those little souls could even fathom possible.

Why am I here and they're not? Why am I sitting here bathed in the light of my laptop screen typing a rambling journal entry into the blogosphere when little lives - some that will never be known even to their parents - are starting and ending all over the planet.

Why did I live when Thomas died?

Why am I so completely unstrung and affected by these losses?

Maybe because it's devastating to me to intimately know the pain my friends are feeling tonight. Maybe because I remember that yawning emptiness and despair after my first miscarriage, and how everything seemed to hurt me. Maybe because my tolerance for loss and sorrow has reached an all time low and I can't bear that it keeps happening to people I care about.

I don't know.

I just know I'm thinking about my two friends and that sad stranger who are all mourning profound losses. And there's not a damn thing I can do to make it better.

All I can say is that I'm so very, very sorry.