On my dresser, sits a beautiful multi tone purple glass picture frame. It sits among framed pictures of my children and grandchild. It sits empty. No pictures were ever captured of her short life.
Rachel Charlotte would be 39 years old next month, had she lived.
She has three living brothers and one living sister. They are a doctor, a biologist, a city planner and a computer engineer.
Which career path would Rachel Charlotte have taken had her life not been taken from the womb?’
I never heard her cry, I never felt her soft skin, I never sang her a lullaby. I never held my baby.
Would she have had the ivory white tone of me, her mother or the warm olive skin of her father? Were her eyes green or brown? Her hair, curly or straight?
Would she be married, how many grandbabies have not been because she was never born?
Would she be crafty, pitch a softball, shoot a three pointer, run for miles or walk a runway? She would be a Kansas City Chief’s fan and would wear the Royal’s blue.
She would grasp her Volga German heritage and master the art of making bierrocks.
She would have been raised Catholic and I would like to think that she embraced her faith.
I never heard her cry, I never felt her soft skin, I never sang her a lullaby. I never held my baby.
After all these years, I still tear up when I think of all that was not.
She was not captured in a photograph, yet there is a seized memory; she did not like the smell at the meat counter. She turned my tummy each time we walked by it. It would go without saying, all these years later, I am reminded of her as I approach the meat section in the grocery store.
She lived only a short few weeks.
She was mine for only a moment.
Rachel Charlotte, I miss you.
And this is why I am silent no more.