If you have not seen “The Princess Bride” we can’t be friends.

And I really want to be your friend, so go watch it. Thirteen times so you really get it. Now go. Shoo.

Ok, now that we are on the same page, I would like you to recall a certain exchange between Vizzini and Inigo:

Vizzini: He didn’t fall? INCONCIEVABLE.

Inigo: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

That keeps echoing in my mind as I struggle to believe my own life. It looks like a movie to me, or something that happened to someone else.

It is utterly inconceivable that I had a baby and he died. So my mind keeps making the whole pregnancy into this movie I watched, but it isn’t my life, it isn’t real.

I keep telling myself it really happened but I don’t believe it.

It’s inconceivable.

I know denial is a part of grief, and have read and been told repeatedly that we cycle through the phases of grief, but I never believed denial would return. (Irony noted)

I look at other parents and I know they see our loss and are sad for us and scared for themselves, but in no way do they believe it could happen to them.

It’s inconceivable.

I have come to the conclusion that is how we survive in a world where the bad things do happen to good people. We can’t begin to conceive that something so awful, so devastating could happen to us. Therefore, we are able to carry on and take risks and rationalize our choices. Because it won’t happen to us, only to others, only in a movie, only if we do this wrong or that wrong or skip our vitamins or don’t look both ways before crossing the street.

Except it happened to me, to my husband, to our son.

I look at pictures and what is left of that little dark line on my belly. I pull my maternity clothes and look at the checkbook where we paid our midwives. (ouch) I stare at his little face for hours. Hours. And I still can’t fathom that I had a son, and I no longer have a son.

Inconceivable.