Loss

Listening to Ed Sheeran. Small Bump will come on in a minute. It doesn’t make me cry. It makes me sob. There are only a few people whose art has ever been able to express how I actually feel over losing Ella. It’s a growing list of:

Ed Sheeran: Small Bump

Phil Collins: Since I Lost You -which he wrote in response to Eric Clapton losing his son.

Eric Clapton: Tears in Heaven

Christina Rossetti: Baby Lies So Fast Asleep

Me: Birth Mother (which I had left untitled)

Me: A Basket of Rushes

Me: Moses

I don’t know that anyone will ever mine to the bottom of my heart to hear this hurt. Oh Lord I miss her. Again, my baby is asleep upstairs. I love her so much, so deeply. But not yet into that harsh parched sparse desert desolate land of seven and a half weeks. My love spills over at the edges, but it never seems to get into that sealed part of pain. I hope she feels my love; knows I loved her then. I was very badly hurt today. This evening, the sadness has welled up loudly but wordlessly. The hiss on the inside is drowning, deafening. No-one can hear it but me.

You are my one and only… And you can wrap your fingers round my thumb and hold me tight. (Ed Sheeran)

I needed someone to have sung how I feel. It’s also Dido’s Lament from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. I am not suicidal, but the words, the melody… somehow express some of this burden of pain. And Summertime sung by Ella Fitzgerald. And Autumn Leaves sung by Eva Cassidy. And Mahalia Jackson’s rendition of Summertime and Motherless Child. And Take the L Train by Brooklyn Funk Essentials.

I think the rawness is the knowing that I have a burden of pain where I should have had a burden of a bundle of baby to bear. In my arms. In my heart. My baby girl. I love you so. And I am so sorry.

Jeremiah 31:15:

This is what the Lord says:

“A voice is heard in Ramah,

mourning and great weeping,

Rachel weeping for her children

and refusing to be comforted,

because they are no more.”