Hello and welcome to An Altitude Problem, where all good things come to an end. Sorry, folks. It seems it takes more than believing and wishy thinking to keep some good things around. And once they are gone, the real challenge is to look around and see all you still have, and have that be enough.

It was a weekend defined by loss, in several different ways. On Thursday, Tom Nightingale, a cousin by marriage, had a fatal heart attack behind the wheel of his semi truck. No one else was injured, but his family- wife and three kids, 10, 13, and 16, had their lives changed forever by that phone call. A young death always turns a community contemplative. Tragedies strike all the time, and like lightening, the ones unaffected feel as though it could have as easily been them- as indeed it could have been.

We had planned to go to the funeral, but that night I started bleeding. The next morning I raced to the clinic, feeling deja vue, hoping against hope but not convinced that I would be more lucky this time and be able to keep this baby. I had blood drawn, and before the results were even back, the heavy bleeding and pain had started and I realized it was already dead. I proceeded to lie on the couch for the next six hours and have a spectacular meltdown, one that had Andy shoving his face against my neck, trying to jostle me out of my distress, and went on for long enough he finally gave up and slept close to me on the floor beside the couch. Bobby came home late that evening and he held me while I spent my hormone-fueled grief and rage on gut-crunching crying and demanding that he explain to me why it had to be that we were only ever allowed a glimpse of how we could be before it was yanked away again. Then, as suddenly as it started, I ran out of tears. With no further comment, in sudden quiet, I got up, took a shower, washed my hair, and in no way felt like putting myself through the discomfort of squeezing out another tear. I had to explain to a shell-shocked Bobby that it was this way last time, too, only last time he hadn't been there for it. This was the part we had to get through before I could readjust to being singular, my body supporting not the future, not our baby, just me. We watched a movie to give our minds a vacation, and I spent the night on the couch so my insomnia-causing headache wouldn't keep us both awake. The next day the cramping pain hit much harder, and that night I moved to the couch again, since the pain was making me toss and squirm and keep him awake. The worst had passed by the next morning, and things were starting to be funny again- at least the funny things. They set my follow-up appointment for this morning, the same time as Tom's funeral, so I ended up opting for going to that and being with the Eicher family in thought and prayer instead of in person.

Altogether, it was not a very good week. I spent the first half of it feeling more pregnant every day- like I awoke every morning with a hangover, and it took me until noon to feel alive. That, I was happy about, since I took it as a good sign that the pregnancy was a stronger one than the last. But it did cut down on productivity. Then I spent two days on bedrest, since that's the usual treatment for a threatened miscarriage, but since I knew it was pointless, it was mostly my excuse for letting myself wallow in self-pity for 48 hours.

In the meantime, Grandpa Weldo has been in the hospital for over a week, bronchitis stressing his body, leading to tachycardia leading to tests and a decision to have open heart surgery to repair a valve. My dad has been working double time at the mill to make up for him being gone. We have been thinking that he would have a surgery in a day or two for a long time now, so I still have not been up there to see him, every day not going because i keep hearing that I should go up tomorrow. I am getting smart. I will be going soon, regardless.

And my car is still in the body shop, which means I have to drive a gas guzzling truck everywhere I go, which keeps me home more. And Bobby is finally working again, which means he has not been able to take me to Hays. They keep telling me that any day, the parts should come in and we should be getting the car back. I am ready. Even though the inside of it smells like tomcat from the unfortunate effects of Marv's surgery in which his little Marvs were removed, leaving him without feeling or muscle control (including bladder control) in his back half until his anesthesia wore off- tomcat urine mixed with cleaning solution makes it smell a little like pine sap, only without the sweet tang to it, just pungent. I miss the little car even though it's not exactly a luxury liner. I miss it and it's ability to take me places on the cheap.

But there's nothing like realizing how good you have it to help you realize how good you have it. I only lost someone I hadn't yet met this weekend. Others lost someone thay had built history with. And I had another reminder this morning of how great my life is, and how insignificant my losses really are. In the last three months in southern Somalia, 30,000 people, many of them perfect, beautiful kids, have starved to death. We are talking kids who were carried to full term, who's parents were overwhelmed by poverty, but cared for them and loved them and watched helplessly as they shrunk inside their skin. If they were even able to be brought to a refugee camp, they were often fed too late for it to make a difference. Kids who survive this latest famine will spend their futures with stunted physical and mental growth. Our baby, lost before it is even born, hardly seems like a tragedy in the shadow of such an enormous waste of healthy, beautiful babies who were already in the world.

I recognize the stages of grief, and know that anger is the one I have been most often returning to these last three days. But it feels good to be able to redirect my anger (made so much worse by the raging hormones of this most recent pregnancy) into rightous anger, anger that while my baby's miscarriage was unavoidable, those deaths aren't. There is enough food in the world to feed them. There is a long and complicated answer to why it can't reach them in time, and why they cannot grow it themselves, but there is enough and it is inexcusable that we can put people into space and crack the human genome and invent particle accelerators and supercomputers before we can put food on every plate in the world.

But thank you for all the support you have given us. I stand by my theory- by keeping you up-to-date with our lives, you know when we need prayers and positive support. Maybe we make ourselves vulnerable, but I like us that way.

We will try again, but not for a while. We are going to test for some of the more obvious reasons I seem to be unable to keep a pregnancy, once my body recovers from this one. In hindsight, this has happened before, more than a few times. There is no reason to think a third one will magically work when the last two confirmed pregnancies did not, nor did any of the suspected ones (obviously). It is time to take a breather and stop putting ourselves through this until we think we have a ghost of a chance of keeping it in there. I can't handle the thought of doing this again right away anyway- the near panic from the moment you find out you are pregnant, fearing you will inevitably lose it, the moment your fears come true, the fallout- it's too much to keep doing.

Until later, faithful few. I'm thankful I have you.