A New Life - Part 1

It's been quite some time since I've mentally been able to sit down and add anything, but I'm going to attempt it now.

So much has happened since Pete's death that I hardly know where to begin. Time seems to have compressed and twisted but I will try to give a chronologically correct version of the events that have unfolded. It was sometime in July/August while Bruce and I were camping out in Pennsylvania that I received a call from Gina. She and her husband had been trying to get pregnant for some time and she was scheduled to begin some fertility pre-treatments the following week in preparation for surgery in September. When she asked if I was sitting down I had a very odd feeling, premonition perhaps, that she was going to tell me that she was pregnant. That's exactly what happened.

There were many challenges for Gina, particularly emotional ones, during the course of her pregnancy, and being separated by 3,000 miles made it very difficult for both of us. She was hoping for a girl so was very disappointed and even angry when given the news that she was carrying a boy. It was especially difficult for both of us when some well-intentioned people would, with crass insensitivity, say how wonderful that we could look forward to having a child to take the place of Pete. Fortunately, those people were few in number.

I flew out to California in the fall for a week and Gina flew back to New Jersey during her winter break. It was during her visit back east that Pete's girlfriend was able to do something that I truly believe was tremendously helpful to Gina in altering her psychological disengagement with the little creature growing inside her and, despite Gina's protests contrary, began to awaken in her an awareness that this was a tiny being with fingers and toes, intent on growing and eventually emerging sometime around his projected due date of April 7, 2012.

As Bruce and I had approached retirement we had often talked about the possibility of moving out of New Jersey but when Pete was diagnosed those thoughts evaporated. After his death, with grandparenthood on the horizon combined with my increasingly emotional reaction to more and more things that ignited painful memories of Pete's ordeal, those thoughts began to resurface.