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Sunday, February 20, 2005
natalie things
I wasn't going to write about this but the words keep running around in my head and maybe they'll stop if I type them out.
There are a lot of things associated with Natalie's brief life which are a source of guilt for me. First there's the gut-deep automatic maternal guilt that whispers that somehow it must be because of me that she was born with problems in the first place. Then there are the more realistic things, like: I should have been more assertive with the medical staff. I should have held her more often. And probably number one on the list, as far as the "we just should have known better" factor, is that we should have taken more pictures of her. We only have a small handful of them, and none (ZERO) from when she was at home, all from the hospital. Once at the hospital we took T's camera in and took nearly an entire roll of pictures of her on what was, in retrospect, probably the best day of her life health-wise. She was not attached to any machines, she had no tubes, she was wearing a cute little ducky sleeper and she drank from a bottle and nursed. We took an entire roll of film. Except when we went to unload the camera we realized there was no film in it. Did we run to the gift shop in the hospital and buy film and take more pictures? No. We still kick ourselves over that. Anyway.
At the time (late 1997/early 1998) we didn't have a video camera, but my brother did. He took some video of Natalie on the day she was born, and then we borrowed his camera and took some video of her in the NICU a few days later, and then he set up the camera to take video of her funeral. We never saw any of that footage, I think initially because it was too raw, and then later because it was all buried in my brother's sizable collection of camcorder cassettes and we never got around to getting it from him. But lately he's been working on a project where he's putting all his home video on DVD, and today when we were at his house he showed us the digitized video of Natalie -- all 15 or so minutes of it. T and I sat at the computer and watched it together. We were handling it OK until it got to the part where I sat by her NICU bed and did what I'd dreamed of doing with my daughter since the age of thirteen or so -- read to her from Anne of Green Gables -- at which point I know I started to cry and I think T did too.
Tears and all, though, it was a wonderful experience. T says that for him it is like, in a way, we got to visit with her. For me, well... hindsight being 20/20 is not always a good thing for our psyches, I know that. From my position in the present time it's easy to look back at all the things I did wrong. I'm so thankful that today I had the opportunity to manage to get past the feelings of guilt and watch the 23-year-old me do what I really did do, whether I remember it most of the time or not -- love her the best I possibly could, and do the best for her that I knew to do at the time.
