How I could have let it pass over me, I'm not certain. Memories get replaced by newer ones, I suppose, pushing onto the sidelines those that once circulated like wispy smoke through my brain: the happy moments before the storm, that vicious cyclone that ripped through my life and left me bleeding on the side of the road, broken and spent.

(Is this really what I should be telling people? Healing happens like this: your memories are so painful, so agonizing, that your brain will heal you by pushing your memories to the back of your mind, into a place that is like a locked file cabinet somewhere in a dusty closet. Sometimes you'll choose to crack open the drawer and let the memories seep out, but it's likely that when this happens you'll push the drawer shut with a slam, and collapse on the floor wondering how you ever managed to cope with such crippling sadness every single day of your life. Is it fair to confess that most of your memory of what happened will become a list of facts, and you'll learn to rattle off the facts while you carefully avoid matching the facts with the feelings that once paired with them? Should I tell people that one day they may learn to recite their story and feel nothing, to be devoid of anything while the words pour out of their mouth like water from a battered, well-loved waterbottle? Should I tell people that this is how it is, that you learn to live with the pain but that sometimes it's sad that your pain has turned into a story, and you can hardly even remember the sadness because you've done such a good job trying to heal? Do I admit that the sadness sometimes has to be re-remembered on purpose?)

So this is how it came to be that it didn't occur to me until I was watching this young, heavily pregnant woman sit in a big, brown leather armchair, with presents to her right being handed to her by her young niece, that I had once been this woman. Literally I had sat in that same chair, in that same living room, for that same reason, on April 13, 2003. A different, small blond child had handed me my gifts. I had laughed like her. One month to the day before all those baby shower gifts would become useless to me, mere tokens of a dream bitterly lost.

This is how it came to be that while I watched this woman open her baby shower gifts, and I realized that I had once sat in that same chair, heavily pregnant with Charlotte, that I let the gauze fall over the memory. I chose not to connect the dots between that fact and the agony of the loss, and I laughed with the others and commented excitedly about the cute clothes that inside I prayed she would have the privilege of using. I hoped so hard for her and her baby, but I did not let myself think about my own loss. And I was successful in not doing so.

Eight and a half years is a long, long time, isn't it?

(but she'd still only be a little girl. How could I have sidelined so much?)