This weekend was our first trip back to Utah since we left. So much has changed in our family – we had a daughter! – but yet it was almost as if she never existed. Our family was the same as when we left Provo: just Tyler, Alie, and baby Jack. Except we’ve got a “grown-up” job and baby Jack now walks and (kind of) talks.

It’s sometimes hard to function and hard to want to get out of bed when the world around you has moved on. I don’t expect other people to hurt the same way I do; it’s not their child that died. But as time passes she gets talked about less and less by family and friends, until it was almost as if she never existed.

It’s easier to deal with the pain that way, to pretend as if she never existed. There’s a gaping hole in my heart but the clock continues to tick and the hours and days and weeks keep passing without my consent.

I got to bottle-feed and snuggle my sister’s 2.5 month old babies this weekend. It was lovely holding a baby again, but in reality it just emphasized my loneliness. My chest was heavy the entire weekend as I ached for little Amelia. Lincoln would coo and smile at me, and I like to think it was his way of telling me she’s all right up there. But most of the time I just wanted to burst into tears anyway because it was almost as if she never existed. It saddened me that she would never get to experience the happiness and joy of being part of a family here on earth. It just doesn’t make it any easier to know what could have been.

Sometimes I wish we didn’t feel. Or that at least I could press “pause” on my emotions, and save them for another time & another day.

Such was the case with this morning. I woke up with a lump in my throat. I realized that time has gotten away from me, for tomorrow Amelia would have been four weeks old. Four weeks old. She would have just barely started growing out of her newborn clothes. I would have changed hundreds of soft, tiny diapers by now, and hopefully, had become an accomplished milk-cow. I would be sleep-deprived and exhausted, but from being her mother instead of from grief.

Oh, how things are so different from how I had planned.

It doesn’t really get better with time. Some days are still really, really hard. Some days I just sit on the couch alone and weep. I’ve heard the emptiness I feel is permanent, that this gaping hole in my heart will never go away. What filled it for such a short time is now lost. So I’m learning to function in this permanent, altered sense of normalcy.

I try not to think what my life would have been. Because it wouldn’t have ever been the way I wanted it, with Amelia still here in my arms. That wasn’t the plan God had for us. That little baby girl at church today with wispy white-blonde hair is a stark reminder of what could have been, but wasn’t meant to have been. But why?

I try not to think too hard. Because take it from me: all of these, “why me?”s  and “why now?”s will get to you soon enough, and then you’re trapped and suffocating in your own thoughts, unwilling to let things go. It’s an endless circle of doubts and fears and scary, scary things.