"She was very good company for a tiny baby. She liked all the songs and stuff, and had lots of medical problems I could think about while we were together so it wasn't even boring like hanging out with a regular baby."

This is a text message I sent to Boyfriend shortly after Kestrel's death, while I was lamenting the fact that I now hated to be alone. 22 days is a short time, but I had already become used to her silent company. Like a minute mime she kicked her tiny feet, pried open her swollen eyes to shoot us piercing gazes, and sucked fervently on the much-hated tube in her perfect pink mouth. I never felt remotely alone while she was alive in the NICU; even at home, even in the middle of the night, we had the babycam to show us a series of still, blurred images of our beloved daughter. What was she doing? Wrinkling up the spot between her nose and eyes in a silent wail of protest? Lying still, having finally submitted to exhaustion? Constantly wondering was a kind of company in itself, never being quite alone when your child is alive and experiencing the world, whether you are there or not.

Now I'm here, but Kestrel isn't. I still wonder in the middle of the night, but now it is all about myself. Will I survive wading through this crushing emptiness for the rest of my days? Will I forget the softness of her hair or the arch of her pale eyebrows? Nothing about Kestrel herself, she is dead and for me there are no what-ifs, so there is no wondering. Grieving is selfish and lonely, where mothering was supposed to be suffocating companionship. I am unable to consider what she "would have been like." In my heart she was the most perfect tiny baby ever to exist, and she will remain that way forever. No wondering about the winding limbs of her life's trees, cut so early that her forest looks like a flattened field. I am alone, left only to wonder about myself, and to pour out tears of self pity that the child who was my life's companion is gone forever.