Everybody hangs on to their pain like it was some special license to suffer. You can't help it. We all think ours is the worst case we ever heard. But burying infants, we bury the future, wieldly and unknown, full of promise and possibilities, outcomes punctuated by our rosy hopes. The grief has no borders, no limits, no known ends, and the little infant graves that edge the corners and fencerows of every cemetery are never quite enough to contain that grief.
Some sadnesses are permanent.
Dead babies do not give us memories. They give us dreams. The world loves closure, loves a thing that can, as they say, be gotten through. This is why it comes as great surprise to find that loss is forever, that two decades after the event there are those occasions when something in you cries out at the continual presence of an absence. On my worst days, early on, I used to think of a little plaque left anonymously by a mother at Verdun, France, where 420,000 died in battle in 1916.