Pre-

There's an unopened email in my inbox.  It's from my mother, sent Christmas Eve morning.  She didn't know we'd been in the hospital overnight.  I didn't have the heart to call her after we got the news.  I wanted our family to have one last night free of grief. 

I haven't had the guts to open or delete it.  Thanks to gmail I know what it says.  She just wanted to know if I was awake and to call her if I was.  As far as my mother knew we'd be over that afternoon, preparing our Christmas smorgasbord and celebrating together.  Or she'd be with me in the hospital, which is what we'd been expecting the night before.  Instead she would get a phone call that her first and only grandchild had died. 

It's my last, small connection to my old life.  I remember about a week earlier thinking how happy and lucky I was.  Pre-emptiness, pre-sorrow.  My life before feels like fiction, like a sitcom that occasionally touches on a serious subject in a humorous light.  I look at pictures of myself from when I was pregnant and I try conjure those feelings of joy and anticipation, because I know I'll never have them again.  That part of my life is over.