I've been reminded lately about those first few days, weeks, months after E died. So many of the moments surrounding the death of your child become the images that play over and over again in your mind. At first, they play on a loop, so frequently that you're not sure you have other thoughts. It's like they become as commonplace as your breath, as your heartbeat. And you despise those thoughts as much as the function of your body that kept going when he didn't.
Others can conceive of the next steps following a child's death, or at least they believe they can. There are funeral arrangements, conversations with your other children, and paperwork that you couldn't read if you tried. But that isn't the part that's been playing in my brain lately. It's the IMMEDIATE moment after that last breath, that last heartbeat that plays on repeat. Because what is that moment? What is to be done right after? You just cradled your child on your lap, set aside your own searing pain, and told him out loud that it is ok to let go. So what's next? You get up off the bed? Do your legs work? Why would they work? HOW would they work? Do you eat? Will food ever go down again? Do you just pick up your purse and walk out?
I still don't remember going down, don't remember what it felt like to hit the pavement. I just know that when I opened my eyes, that's where I was. Also, I could hear screaming. It was a sound so deafening I wanted to also call it silence. When I tried to make out its origin, I realized that it was coming out of me. The guttural, foreign sound wasn't foreign at all. It was mine. My voice. My pain. I know that my sister and my brother-in-law helped me into the car so that we could make the 2-hour drive home. I'd made that trip so many times before, but this time I would both ignore the landscape outside my window and etch it in my mind forever. My chest would burn with aching loss, and my thoughts raced as I tried to make sense of what would come next. What would I do with his toothbrush? Would I keep it? Would his room remember the little boy who just a short month ago had crawled along its carpeted floor and emptied its dresser drawers with the destructive expertise that only a toddler can muster? Would it be expecting him to come back? Was I expecting that, too?
I remember the people who showed up, the people who stayed. I remember the ones who would still look me in the eye and the ones who no longer looked at me like I was human. There was a tribe of women who gathered around me, and let me scream and cry and lose myself more and more. They came under the guise of sisterhood, but what they were doing was keeping me from ending my life. And at times, that was certainly warranted. It's not that I WANTED that. I just didn't know how a body and soul so utterly broken were supposed to go on living. I couldn't comprehend it. That's when those who had gone before me entered the chat. Those mothers whose brokenness had left them screaming and burning with their own pain were turning back to hold out their hands to the one who'd just fallen on the pavement. Held their hands out to me. How were they doing that? Were they breathing again? Did their hearts beat like they once had? Would I breathe one day, too?
While I couldn't conceive of such a possibility at the time, I've come to learn that when the light does start entering again, it fills in the cracks. Nothing is solid or whole, but it is filled with something more, something bigger. And there are times I think of him and only smile. There are times that I'm so unbelievably grateful for the experiences we shared because it allows me to do my own turning back and reaching. It's my hand that's able to reach across the abyss now. It's me who's breathing in without the burn. And instead of being surprised by the ache in my own voice, I hear myself telling the next broken mother there is a next step. And though you can't see it, there is a next breath. It may not be today, or tomorrow, or next year, but it's out there. Maybe we'll take that next step together. Maybe we'll trade who does the leading and who does the following. But if we allow for the belief in that one next breath, there will be another...
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