What else is there to say? I feel a little dizzy and a little numb.

I can’t say I didn’t know it would happen…in my heart I knew from the moment she was diagnosed–but sometimes I hoped and loved so hard that I couldn’t see that anymore. I could reach past the breathing tube, ng tube, layers and layers of tape, and find a sweet baby’s lips.

If I hadn’t been holding her when she died, I don’t know if I could truly believe that she is dead. She turned blue so much faster than I thought she would. But until that moment, you could have almost pretended she was healthy. The seizures were causing her to make the kind of movements a newborn makes in sleep. I worried that it meant she was in pain but the nurses told me that with everything she was on, there was no chance of pain; and with all the damage, she likely could not comprehend pain anymore.

When she was truly gone, I held her up to my chest. I hadn’t been able to do that in months because of the breathing tube. I held her the way a baby should be held–head resting on my heart so my heartbeat could lull her to sleep. I put my face in her hair, because I knew I’d miss that hair. It was the last time she still felt almost like a baby; after that she felt like a doll.