“Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Can I have your phone?”

We haven’t even sat down on the baseball field bleachers and Anessa is reaching for my purse like a fiend looking for their next hit. I used to feel bad that Anessa got dragged to all her brother’s baseball games, until I realized that she was living her best barely supervised, snack-eating, phone-watching life.

I unlock my phone to hand to Anessa and a picture of Jackson and Adelaide cuddling on our couch in Chicago stares back at me from a widget/app/thing that displays a randomly rotated photo. They are both in their pj’s and Jackson has his arms around her in a possessive cuddle as he watches TV. The picture is just a still, but I can hear Adelaide’s grunts of protest as she tries to loosen herself from her brother’s embrace.

This image, which had been so mundane, so routine to me just half a decade ago, was now relegated to my memories.

I stared at Adelaide’s face for just a moment trying to decipher the mixture of emotions I was feeling, like a sommelier reporting on the notes of a bottle of wine. Usually, when I happen upon photos of Adelaide, I can easily label my feelings as some form of loss and love. But this time it was muddled, resistant maybe? Before I could land on the right combination, I swiped away from the picture to the folder labeled, “Anessa’s games”. I handed the phone over to an impatient and fidgety Anessa who immediately calmed when the weight of her dopamine fix hit her hands.

Immediately sucked into the usual on-field and off-field activity happening around me, the picture and its corresponding emotions, left my mind. Until that night, anyway, when it all came back to me just as my head was hitting the pillow.

I’d seen that particular photo dozens of times and with the flip of an internal switch, I could see it as if projected on a screen in my mind. Again, I tried to assess my emotional response.

Initially, I felt shocked. While that used to be our normal, I felt so far removed from it now. Not to mention the memory was wildly out of context in my current setting. The collision of two worlds, two lives.

The guilt was quick to follow because how could that photo shock me like that? That was my daughter, that was our life. How had I allowed so much distance to grow between my past and present lives?

Then the loss settled in, like a weighted blanket – all at once heavy and comforting. I saw her cheeks, her bedhead hair, her belly with its g-tube visible under her hiked-up shirt. I imagined checking the numbers on her pulse-ox, which isn’t pictured but was always close, to be sure Jackson wasn’t hugging her too tightly.

Not to be outdone, guilt reclaimed its top position as I realized that missing Adelaide had not been my first reaction.

But then I had done something even more egregious. I swiped the photo away, handed my phone to my new daughter, and returned my attention to the baseball game. In short, I moved on.

I registered the familiar signs of my anxiety revving up, my heart racing and swelling so that it felt like it might burst from my chest. I tried to recenter myself in the physical world of my bedroom. Behind me, Miguel had his bedside light on and was mindlessly scrolling through his own dopamine time suck. His light cast my shadow, lying in bed, on the wall.  

I knew the shadow was mine, yet I felt detached from it. As if at any moment it could get up and walk away like Peter Pan’s. But I wasn’t a lost boy, enchanted by fairy dust, yearning to be a child forever. Adelaide, on the other hand, would always be almost four, eternally a child, frozen in time.

I was not frozen, I was aging, growing, and living. My life moved forward while she stayed behind. Her memory no longer consumes my every waking moment. I think of her daily, many times a day in fact, but still far less than I used to. Her memory and the grief tied to it has lessened its hold on me. I knew this would happen eventually. I just didn’t know when.

And then I finally realized what that photo had triggered in me that evening: a new kind of grief. Not grief for having lost my daughter, for missing her, or for the love I feel but have nowhere to direct. No, this grief was for the passage of time between Adelaide’s frozen place and my fluid one. It is thickly coated in guilt, because how could I let Adelaide’s memory drift so far from my regular thoughts?

But even as I clocked the guilt, I knew it was irrational. This is normal, healthy even. I am healing. And it is as uncomfortable as ever.

ID: Jackson is wearing a long-sleeved green shirt and bacon and eggs pj pants. His mouth is open while he watches TV with his arms around his sister in a possessive cuddle. Adelaide is wearing white pj’s with donuts on them, her shirt is hiked up and her belly button and g-tube are visible. They are sitting on a blue couch. Some wires can be seen off to the side and a white blanket rests on top of the couch behind them.