My Husband Made His Doctor Promise to Give Me an Envelope Only After He Was Gone
I had been afraid, through the last weeks of my pregnancy, of exactly this moment — the collision of the two enormous feelings, the grief and the joy, arriving together in the same body at the same time.
I had feared that they could not coexist, that the joy of Cecelia would feel like a betrayal of my grief for Mark, or that the grief would poison the joy, staining the happiest moment of my life with the saddest.
I had braced for the two feelings to be at war, and for me to be the battlefield.
And what I discovered, holding my daughter, was that I had misunderstood how the heart works.
The grief and the joy did not fight.
They did not cancel each other, or compete, or take turns.
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