Adjusting to our first home without Jas has been hard, but I guess that goes without saying. That I will never again hold her seems so unreal, so nightmarish and surreal. I keep thinking back to the last time I saw her body, cold and peaceful at the crematorium. She had a postmortem, so we couldn't really hold her then. The last time I held her was the night she died. Those last moments, that last hour are etched in my mind as if they happened yesterday, today even. I imagine it will always be that way.

When my grandmother died during my teen years, I didn't get to see her immediately before her death, after her death, or even to attend her memorial service. I had a hard time thinking of her as dead. I have often dreamt that she is not really dead, that someone made a mistake and she was just really sick and in my dream, she is back. She's always a transparency of herself, though, a shade, and the threat of her disappearing is always present. I remember Jeff saying that when his dad died, he kept expecting to see him somewhere, as if he had pulled the mother of all practical jokes on us, and again, I thought this had to do with the fact that he never saw his dad's body.

Now I know differently. It isn't about seeing the body. I held Jasmine when she died. I held her after. I caressed her foot and touched my forehead to the curve of her nose for the last time, something I did to say goodbye when she was alive. I anointed her cold body at the crematorium with rosemary oil to purify her for her journey to the Otherworld. I have her ashes sitting on my dresser in my bedroom. I have hefted their weight in my hands -- it is startling how little it weighs, and yet how it is also absurdly heavy.

And still, still even though I had these very concrete experiences of Jasmine as dead, still my mind has a hard time accepting that I will never have that hug. Seven months later, I still expect someone to call and say there was a horrible mix-up and my child did not die. Still, even though I held her, witnessed her death and visited her at the crematorium. I still look for her when we have family outings, because something is missing, something is off kilter.

My sense of disbelief doesn't come from not seeing a body. It comes from the unbelievable hole that is left in the fabric of my life now that she is gone. How can it be there? How does the fabric still hold? How can it still be strong? Surely someone, some Great Cosmic Weaver, will come along and fix that hole, make it the way it was Before. Surely someone will, because the alternative just doesn't seem possible. Live with that hole? Impossible.

I don't know if this feeling will ever go away. I am still waiting to hear from her somehow, waiting for some kind of communication from beyond. So far, she's keeping her own counsel.

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