I don’t know how to grieve.

Ever since I was a little girl I feared death. Was terrified of it. In 6th grade I spent the entire year waiting for the evening when I would fall apart and make myself sick over someone potentially dying.

I’d never really experienced it. My grandpa died a few years ago but he was sick and old and I missed him tremendously but it wasn’t a shock. I wasn’t there when it happened so it didn’t stick with me.

This sticks with me.

I can’t shake the images of their birth. Preston’s short life. His few hours against me struggling to breathe. It replays over and over again in my head like a nightmare I can’t wake from. Everywhere I turn, there it is. What we lost. My minivan we bought. The clothes. Bella. Knowing her tiny hands would have one day been theirs too.

I don’t care that everyone thinks what I did was so brave. I’d give ANYTHING to have them here. With us. Still pregnant with them. I’d trade it all. The emails of people asking me how I got to work for Babble or how lucky I was to work from home or have twins or be settled – jealous now? Jealous of this? I would have (and did) give it all up for them. I can barely function. The pictures on Facebook of babies haunt me with a terror I didn’t even know I could feel. I can’t breathe without it hurting. I can’t think without their faces. I laugh and smile and it all washes over me that as I do this my sons lay in a morgue waiting to be cremated and there isn’t one damn thing I can do to make it stop.

I have no idea how to handle this. No idea where all this pain should go, or if it has to go somewhere. I can’t make it go away and part of me doesn’t want it to because it seems horrible to not hurt this bad for them.

I’m so angry but I don’t know at what. Maybe me. My body. My inability to do something a woman was created to. I barely held onto Bella, and I couldn’t even make it with them long enough for them to have a shot at life. I didn’t know. I tried so hard, talked to everyone I could about what I could do this time around. I was so scared, so scared from the moment we got pregnant that something would happen to them. I tried to reason all the ways it wouldn’t – mine would be different. I wanted them more. I was documenting it. I did all the right things.

And now they’re gone. It didn’t matter. They are still gone from me. It was my biggest fear and it happened anyway. And I don’t know what to do. I don’t know.

I just want it to be all better. I want my sons back. I want to wake up and have this all be gone, for it to be over and it never will.

And so I sit here in bed and cry and mourn and write because I don’t know what else to do to make it all stop.