Dear Lucy,

I have never actually sat down to write you a letter. For some reason, it just didn't seem important. I don't talk to you in my head, or in my prayers. I used to cry and call for you, but nothing happened. It was still silent, and so that ritual fell away, like so many others. I wish I even had a sense of what someone so little and dead would want to talk about. Maybe I thought the talking was more for me than for you, and that felt selfish. I'm sorry, love, if you felt abandoned by my silence. I have wanted to talk to you and feel you around me since I knew you were no longer with me. Even before that, mijita, even before that.

I think the pain of not talking to you aches in me as much as the shock of your death. I don't have a sense of who you are or who you would be. It is easy to talk to my Nan, because I knew her, and I knew her humor and we can laugh together, or I can share things I know would be important to her too. I miss knowing you and all the little things that make you Lucy. I miss that part of being your mother. When Beatrice and I are cleaning, I ask her all her favorite things. Her favorite day is Tuesday, and her favorite colors are pink and orange, and she thinks that people falling over is about the funniest thing, but only really if they laugh about it too. Would you like that too? What is your favorite day? My least favorite day is Monday. That is the day you were born, and for many months after than, Monday seemed cursed to me. I think my favorite day is Thursday.

I feel tender when people tell me that you would be proud of me, or what you would want for me, or what I should do in your name. If I don't talk to you, sometimes, I possessively think no one should talk to you. I know you never belonged to me, but still sometimes I feel like you did. I feel like that about all my children, actually, like each of them belongs to me, and then realize over and over again, that they belong to themselves, and I just am blessed to watch them figure out their lives and their favoriteness for themselves.


Yesterday, Beatrice explained to me that even though you are naked and dead, you are still cute. I think that is when it occurred to me that I should tell you that more often.  Lucy, in the list of people I think are cute, you are there, right on top, eternally little, beautiful, perfect, like a wax figure of love in my mind.That is what you are, and what you taught me, and what I know about you, you taught me about what love is and how to love in every inch of me--from my tearducts down to my aching, engorged breasts, from my brain, (no matter how I explicated it, I loved you) to the state of pure energy that resides in my chest. I love you without even a breath from you.

I'm not going to sign this letter. I think you know it is from me, because I whispered it on the wind to you, and typed it directly on my heart, and published it on the internet in case you are visiting India and can only access my thoughts in a cafe which charges the US equivalent of ten cents a minute.

Have fun seeing the world, my little beauty. Wish you were here.