my family says good-bye (warning: disarmingly cute baby pictures in this post)

after we ate pancakes together, we took my family to the airport and sent them back to florida. i feel bad that their vacation was dampened by our scare on thursday. my mom and sister waited at home with my nephew, nervously anticipating the news. on friday and saturday, i was still so tired, we didn't do much. but we did have the time together, and what matters i suppose is that we were together.

my sister and i had exactly three minutes alone together yesterday afternoon, and she tried to explain how badly she felt that she had never actually said "i'm sorry" about hans. i don't know if that's true, frankly - i don't remember specifically what she said or didn't say, but i wasn't aware of it before yesterday. she also struggled with guilt for a while, that her son lived and mine didn't. she did eventually accept that she didn't do anything wrong for having a healthy son, but she has been carrying the weight of not having specifically said anything about hans for the last seven months.

then we got interrupted, so i never got to respond. as they entered the security line at the airport, i whispered to her that i will e-mail her later, and she understood. here's what i will tell her:

what i remember is that as soon as i could tolerate holding a phone to my ear, she listened while i told her what had happened. and even though she had a two-week old infant, she got in a car with her husband and our dad and her son and drove 15 hours to get here for the memorial service - and a little over 24 hours later went through the whole trip in reverse. that she was here meant the world to me.

as soon as i saw my nephew the first time, i understood that he was not hans, and that it was not my nephew's fault that hans had died. his life did not take anything away from hans. it does make me sad sometimes that my nephew will not know his cousin-twin. but my nephew brings me nothing but joy, and now he will have a cousin just a little over a year younger, and i hope they will be close.

when i've been around my nephew before this week (when they were here for the memorial service, and when he was about 3 months old and i went down to florida to visit), i haven't thought of hans or how he would compare. i think it's because i've always thought of hans as a toddler when i think of him as a living child. when i was pregnant with him and dreamed or daydreamed of him, he was 18 or 24 or 30 months, playing in the tupperware drawer while we cooked dinner or carrying a towel to "help" us carry the laundry up from the basement, his small legs working doubletime to keep up with us coming up the stairs. when i've seen other children since i lost him, the ones that have bothered me have been the toddler boys because they remind me of my image of him; newborns were never a problem.

this time, i spent the most time with my nephew by far, so far, and as the week wore on, i did find myself finally starting to think, oh, i wonder if hans would be playing the i-drop-it-you-pick-it-up game yet? would he be cooing and squealing and laughing at me? would he be sitting up on his own and trying to pull up on things? would he be holding his own bottle? it was a mixed blessing. i saw what i was missing. but i also got to see what i was missing. tears are running down my face now as i regret what i won't know with hans. but it was also sweet to get a little vision of what hans would have been like - maybe call it a virtual memory, something to add to my mental scrapbook. my god - it brings a fresh, raw wave of grief over me. i haven't cried like this over hans in weeks. but it's mixed in with the joy of getting a glimpse of him. such a strange, strange brew.

i still want hans back. i will always want him back. but i do have a lovely, beautiful nephew - who, by the way, it the most sweetly-tempered baby i've ever known and STILL is a whole heck of a lot of work. and somehow i manage to have the tadpole still cooking along.

not to mention that i have justin - still The Greatest Thing That Ever Happened To Me. after we dropped my family off and before he had to go to work, we sat in the park and listened to this american life, and periodically he rested his hand on my ever-more-pooching belly. it doesn't get much better than that.

key to pics:

• my sister and my nephew, on her birthday
• shocked to be getting a bath in the kitchen sink of our carriage house
• he recognizes the bottle format but is dismayed to not find a way to get any milk out
• practicing taking steps with a little help from his nonna and his favorite aunt
• playing "airplane" with uncle justin