waking thoughts

the whole newsletter fiasco was disappointing, but it just made me sad that we were even in a position to care about a third-rate piece of mimeographed nonsense. i found myself bent over the kitchen counter, crying into a dish towel depicting a paris cafe scene - a housewarming present from my mother. cute, but not nearly absorbent enough, dammit.

what i really hate about blows like this one is that they remind me that hans's death is permanent. he's not absent because of a delay, or because we have to pass some test to "get it right." he's never coming back. his ashes are not going to spontaneously reconstitute themselves into a real, live boy.

i hate that.

*****

last night, we gave the doppler a whirl. we had tried it together once, last week, and got a little flicker of a response after ten minutes or so of trying. but last night, within seconds, justin zeroed right in on z, and we got to listen to that lovely little heartbeat, all 170 bpm of it.

i love that.

*****

my nephew, hans's cousin-twin, celebrated his first birthday last friday. his party was saturday. my sister did call and invite us to come if we could (we live nearly a thousand miles apart), but i didn't have to hesitate or talk it over with justin first before telling her that i didn't think so. she didn't ask callously - she knew what it meant to ask us - but her openness made it easier for me to be straightforward with her and just say, no, i don't think so. i told her we were planning to get him a belated present in japan.

that's what i can do for him right now.

he took his first steps last week. i wonder if hans would have been on the verge of the same.

i've been thinking about hans, and how he lives on, or doesn't. i think sometimes why it hits me so hard when i realize that hans isn't coming back is that i've spent so much time thinking of hans in the here and now. i feel almost political about stating, "i *have* a son." "hans *is* my son." i feel like i have to fight so hard to define that he was real, that he did exist and that i am his mother, i'm *a* mother - and all those present-tense verbs are in conflict with the finality of his death.

i asked justin this morning if he thought hans was still around in some way. i asked because i woke up this morning and could smell him. it's only happened a few times, and each time, when i can't smell him any more, i think that i've lost that smell for good. so today it occurred to me that maybe it's hans, making himself known to me. every once in a while, when he concentrates hard.

justin said, "i think he lives on in our minds."

"and in my heart," i said.

i had a sensation once, not too long after he died, of him being sort of butterfly-like and fluttering around my shoulders. was it him? or my imagination? or my yearning for him? i have a hard time believing in ghosts (ironic given the title of this blog, i know...), and yet i can't quite accept that when the body dies, that spark within us just goes dark. i believe matter is constant; why not spark, or spirit, or soul, or whatever?

i don't need an answer to the question. i'm okay with just pondering it.