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Thursday, August 05, 2004
remembrance
So I was going along today, having a good time looking at wedding dresses online with a friend, ignoring the increasing heap of dirty laundry and the clothesline full of clean laundry, playing with the kids, you know, the usual. And then I read getupgrrl's post for today (note: arm yourself with a box of tissues before clicking that link). Damn. All of a sudden my day has a different color to it. Although I've never had a miscarriage, getupgrrl's entry is about more than that, as she says herself; it's about loss, and memory, and (as one commenter put it) the way we keep our babies alive in a way by remembering...My own story could start in a lot of places but the most reasonable place is on Christmas in 1997. I was nine and a half months pregnant. We had thought we'd have no gifts at all that year, because we had so little money, but that was OK because our son was so young (19 months) that he wouldn't notice or care. Then we got a windfall on Christmas Eve -- Reader's Digest published a joke I'd sent them, of all things -- and so we had some money for gifts. We bought my son a Sesame Street video, among other things. As soon as he opened it he wanted to watch it, so we put it in; it played over and over that day, while I made Christmas dinner and my parents came over, me lumbering around the house eager to go down and get this baby outside of me the next day, all of us laughing at the batty bats and the alligator king and all those other sesame street bits. That was the last day that everything was OK. Over the next months and years I would find myself aching every time that Sesame Street movie was played -- even now when my daughter watches it I ache for that day, the last day when everything was all right and we had no clue about the nightmare into which we were about to be plunged. The next morning my daughter was surgically removed from my body and brought into a world where her damaged heart had a very hard time coping. She was blue; she didn't breathe on her own; she was under observation; she was transported to the children's hospital after I got to touch her little hand just once through the isolette they had her in; she was diagnosed with a very bad, very scary, very rare congenital heart defect; she likely wouldn't live. And our nice little world crashed down. And like other women who've experienced loss, I remember certain aspects of the experience -- like the video, like the shirt I wore to the hospital, like the buttons on the phone in my hospital room as I lay there alone while the pediatric cardiologist explained, with calm composure, why my daughter might not live through the next few days -- with crystal clarity.
Fast forward two months, through a lot of pain and a lot of joy and a goodly share of frustration with the medical profession and a general lack of sleep, and we arrive at a new set of emotional triggers. The room at the hospital, which after a remodel is now part of the x-ray department, where I, who had zero experience with being the responsible person in the face of death, asked my dad, do I have to stay here? will the funeral home people need to see me or can we go? I don't want to be here. Variegated pink-and-yellow-and-white yarn reminds me of the way I sat in my living room with my sleeping son on my lap, staring at the project I'd started for our daughter, wondering what would become of it now -- I later finished that blanket, needing the mindless occupation, and then sent it to my best friend for her little girl. Winter sunrise over our town reminds me, even now, of the surreal experience of telling people we knew whom we encountered on that early-morning walk, she died this morning. The brown bedspread I sometimes still use brings back the way our house emptied out over the course of the day, until it was just us and my parents and they watched our son while my husband and I went and laid down on our neatly-made bed and finally cried, big ugly heaving sobs, and clutched each other blindly and tried to come to terms with the fact that she was gone. Cloud shadows chasing each other on a bright, windy day call up the day of her funeral as if it was happening right now, with my bewildered, beloved little boy captivated by the flowers and the people and gasping with mock surprise when the wind blew over a floral display bigger than he was.
It has been almost seven years now. The baby boy is eight years old and reaches my shoulders and has no memory of the sister toward whom he was so affectionate during her brief life; we have a daughter who will never know her sister, but at four years of age, sometimes pretends she does. Our life is good and happy and full of joy, and not a day goes by when we don't think of our little Natalie, and how she'd have been now, and what her life would have been like. The images associated with her brief life are as vivid as they have ever been. I don't think they will ever fade. Thank God for that. --------
Posted by Rachel on August 5, 2004 09:37 AM in
