Shifting Slowly

I didn’t want to fail but it wasn’t really up to me. When I was losing him, I swear I thought I was going to get to keep him. They told me they heard his heartbeat every time they put the monitor to my belly. You could hear his beautiful, strong heartbeat. He wanted out of there too. He wanted to see us too and hug us and kiss us and play with us and watch us grow old and be a big brother. He wanted us to watch him smile and laugh and discover everything this world had in store for him. Sadly, that wasn’t up to us. What we most want sometimes, isn’t up to us.

I want to believe he’s better off wherever he is but the truth is, my angry side. The side that took away my belief in becoming a mother tells me differently. It tells me he’d of had the best life with us here.

He’d of been 12 this year.

No one really prepares you for loss. They don’t really talk about the possibility of it happening or how to really cope with it. They tell you, everyone grieves differently. They don’t tell you that losing a child is so very different from losing an adult. Someone that had the chance to live and experience life. Someone that maybe felt love and gave love. They don’t tell you any of this.

No one barely talks about what it feels like to go to a place that you place high hopes on helping you save your child, only to come home with an empty stomach but still protruding where his body used to lay. Or how you’ll go to sleep and wake up the next day having forgotten for a split second, then like an avalanche it all comes rushing back; the scare, the scream, the giving birth to death, the asking if you want to hold him, the no and then the box they give you with pictures of his beautiful face and the knitted hat they placed on him; in case he was cold?

We do such ridiculous things to sweep under the rug such raw moments. Instead, I pictured him yelling out to me, “Mommy, don’t let them do this to me. Help me mommy,” and they just couldn’t see his suffering through the monitor. They assumed his strong heartbeat meant he was going to be able to make it and fight whatever it was and make it to the other side where me and his father waited months to meet him.

Instead, I can still hear the screams of his father as he crouched down in defeat in that hospital hallway yelling, “not my son, no, not my son!”

This, they don’t tell you. They are unable to. We are unable to express how loss is more than a burial in a small box placed underneath the dirt. It’s the pieces we lose of ourselves. It’s the hope and dreams that go lost too and get buried in that box with it. It’s the stories we had made up about him that get buried, that we’ll never, ever get to know if they could have been true or not. If we could have ever pushed him on a swing or let him go when he yelled, “let go, let go” and pedaled himself down the road.

Yes, dreams and hope eventually come in other forms, in other lives, other births. But it doesn’t mean we ever forget the losses and the confusion that came before.

I can tell you, those having lost, losing now, about to lose; stay in your pain, stay there for a while. Stay in the stories you built. Write them down. Stay in your confusion, in your hurt, in your disbelief. Eventually you’ll know when it’s time to catch your breath and then another one and one more. You’ll know when to put it to rest in peace.

Every so often, the moment will hit, that loss will hit, those feelings will hit and you just steady yourself. Ask to be excused if you must and you remember that child, that hope, those dreams and give it the life it didn’t get to have here, on this earth plane. Say its name, picture its voice, its face and give it life, even if only but for a moment, give it life.