A letter to my baby on the one-year anniversary of her death, and to her older sibling, the children we lost.

I'm so sorry I never knew you. Didn't know your face, your hands and feet, your hair, your eyes. I don't know if you looked more like your daddy or like me. I lost you before you were able to be anything. You didn't live a day on this earth, but you live every day in my heart. I'm so glad I got to see you a few times, dancing around on that computer screen. Your daddy and I would come home from the hospital laughing about our dancing baby, wondering if you were a boy or a girl. We found out 6 months after you died that you were a little girl. I wish you could have been born, so you could have been a playmate to your older cousin. I just wish you could have been born. As long as I am on this earth, I'll never understand why you were taken from us. I know I'll finally hold you in Heaven one day, and some days I know I wish I could be there with you and your older sibling right now. I imagine that Jesus is rocking two cribs in Heaven, keeping you content until your daddy and I get there. But I just miss you so much and it is still so painful. You must know that I love you, I love you as if I had held you and heard your laughter, and saw you take your first steps, and held your hand on the way to your first day of school, and fretted over your first date, and all the things that I missed with you. I love you like I had a whole life with you, even though I have to face a whole life without you.

Leah trips over her own Nine Wests walking into the bar. It's not a club--there's too many college kids. It's not really her territory, but her co-workers convinced her that it would be fun to go out tonight. It would give them something to talk about over the cubicle walls tomorrow. Thirsty Thursday, they said. A Thirsty Thursday at home is a Thirsty Thursday wasted. That gem was Jennifer's.

"Hey!" Jenn yells from twenty feet away. Leah's cheeks flush and burn. "Look who made it! Hey, it's Leah! See, I told you I'd shame her into coming." She's already sloshing her martini over the sides of the glass. Leah couldn't tell if it was the booze, or the fourteen people pushing her from all sides.

"Yeah, here I am!" Leah says defeatedly.

"Oh, come on! Don't be lame! Tonight is Girls Night Out! We're gonna have a blast!" Elise, ever the enthusiast.

"I thought it was Thirsty Thursday," Leah interjects.

"That too," says Jenn, as the girls cheer and klink their glasses. More martini on the floor.

Leah waves down a server and orders herself a Jack and diet cola. She's not messing around tonight.

Leah, Jenn and Elise met about eighteen months ago while working for a major health insurance provider in South Carolina. A pretty boring job: lots of customer complaints, claims processing, all the pencil-pushing mumbo jumbo one can think of. They made it interesting by trading sarcastic barbs throughout the day. No topic was off-limits. Usually Elise bowed out of the competition early; she was too nice to actually be good at sarcasm. Jenn and Leah were like a mind fused. It was scary what they could come up with together. They would constantly joke that their dream was to leave the company and create their own Family Guy type show, about single girls. Nothing like Sex and the City.

Jenn and Elise went out most weekends. They were both attractive girls, Elise tall, soft-spoken, and blonde, the trifecta, and Jenn spunky, into hot pink and showing off her gymnast's body. Leah wasn't unattractive, but she knew she wasn't like her friends. She was 30 pounds overweight, and was generally average-looking. She definitely didn't attract a lot of guys. She knew it probably had more to do with how she acted--isn't that what all the magazines say?--but she wasn't willing to dumb herself down so a guy would notice her. It's the double-whammy: self-conscious with principles.

She's thinking, What is wrong with me? My life is great--why do I always want what I can't have? Why do I always try to think of how things could be better?

She knows why, really. It's in her genes. A thousand different options pop up in her brain at every turn, and she only gets to pick one. The others have to lay down and fade like newsprint in the sun. You can't turn around and pick another one up if the first didn't work. Life isn't a Choose Your Own Adventure book. But for her, the other options never fade. They lay dormant, and when she's sitting idly by, they start blinking neon green: "Betcha wish you picked me now!" It's a cruel reality, especially because she has no reason for regret. Many reasons for grief, but not regret.

A solitary tear burns and blurs her vision momentarily. She leans her head back and soaks it back in. I am not crying for a life that never was. I'm done doing that. She means this in three ways.