A Baby with a Name

{our sweet firstborn, touched by loss at a young age}

Six years ago today I went to the hospital, pregnant with a baby with no heartbeat. Some hours later I went home to my pig-tailed firstborn, not quite two years old, no longer expecting our second, a baby we were going to name Benjamin Jack or Sierrah Grace.

Some weeks later, in the beginning stages of grief, Jonathan and I decided to name our lost baby. I have never shared that name publicly. It has felt too personal to me, too sacred.

We named our sweet little one Jordan.

Jordan means "Descendant" which I loved because this was our child, whether we got to keep him (?) or not. Jordan can be a boy name or a girl name, and although we have always felt our baby was a boy, we have no proof of that and no way to know.

I loved that it is a Hebrew name, just as Hannah is. I liked that even in death, they shared something.

I also loved that this baby, so wanted and so loved, had a name that began with the same letter as both of his parents.

So there's no birth certificate, no hospital baby bracelet, no ink-stamped little footprints, no announcement picture. But there's another child in my heart. Not just Hannah and Natalie, but Hannah, Jordan and Natalie. I have two living children; two here to hold and to raise, and a third I hold in my heart.

Jordan Lynn: carried in my womb for 10 weeks; carried in my heart for a lifetime.

Never forgotten, not for a day. Particularly remembered every year on this date, November 10th.

Reflections on An Evening in the Mist

It's sunset on a Wednesday evening in August, and I step out of a bookstore to wet mist and the aroma of sickeningly sweet salt water taffy. Inside the candy store, wood flooring greets my Mary Jane flats and I stick a quarter in an electric player piano and the whole store turns to look at me as jazzy bar tunes explode from the piano that is playing itself.

All of my senses are completely delighted.

It's like a welcome vacation from real life. Real life with disease and a painful joint condition. Real life with work and stress. Real life with laundry and dishes and dirty floors. Real life with insomnia and rough mornings.

This, right here and right now, can stay.

New books and comfy leggings and knit dresses and little girls holding hands with their daddy and player piano music in a candy store at sunset in a little coastal town one summer evening in the mist.