Her birthday...and her last day approaches

Sage's tree is blooming..sweet pink and yellow flowers...5 more days until her second birthday. 11 more days until her second anniversary of the last day I held her. It seems more and more like a dream....sometimes I don't even think it happened to me...to us...then I get a flashback and WHAM...it is right there again. The screaming...the ambulance ride and my midwife with her hand up inside trying to keep her head off her cord....the surgical suite with the anethesiologist forcing a mask over my face with no air in it and me shoving him away....the team yelling at me to push when I had nothing to put my feet into for leverage...the sound of cpr being performed on my little girl...still warm and pink but already flown from this world...The cocky doctor saying to give me Versed "she doesn't need to remember this"...the sound of the trauma helicopter coming to take Sage to another hospital...then the smell of betadyne...the smells of the NICU....the sights of the smallest ones struggling and thanking all the gods that my girl was spared that fate....she was perfect...still...warm...pink...but gone...so very very gone. These memories flash back to me every day like a smack in the face just for an instant and then gone...then they return again and again....I change the radio station, TV station, web page...I hum a tune...I walk in a circle...I rub my pendant I've worn ever since and try to ward them off....I cram my life full of thoughts and worries and good memories trying to drown them out but still they come...slowly at first when the weather turns colder building up to a barrage. It will suck for the next few days...weeks...and then they will recede like the tide...I will be left again with faint images and occasional skipped heart beats until next year...when the air turns cold, her tree blooms again, and her movie starts to play once more in my mind.