I wanted chaos
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I wanted chaos.
Sore nipples insanely tired.
But I am empty.
Searching for my son
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After Patrick’s death, my world collapsed. I went from seeing his care team every day, to not at all. They looked after The Living Babies, and I had now been transferred to the Dead Baby Department. As wonderful as these new people were, I felt like an appointment in a calendar. I had lost the day-to-day banter of the ward. A person was now required to contact me on a certain day to ask pre-prepared questions about my feelings. They had never met my child, yet the ones that had, were now lost to me. My life was now static. I’d lost my people. My house was empty. My baby was dead.
Read MoreWe need a better word
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The female body is such a powerful, loving-but-stern gate keeper for the threshold of life, and she has an array of incredibly subtle and nuanced chemical tests she runs and reads and runs again. She rarely fails. We may not understand her. But she knows what she's doing. She learned it from her mother, and her mother's mother, back literally to the trees and the caves. She's one of those natural forces we can't negotiate with, we can only sit in awe and wonder and thank her for her work, and marvel over its results, and not so much question her process. We can't fully know it, and we can't fully understand it. We can only admire it. And damn it all, sometimes we're forced to just try and accept it as best we can through our tears.
Read MoreCulture of numbness
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Occasionally I observe people legitimately upset, lamenting the lives of the deceased. Those people, I’ve witnessed, appear to embrace their emotions across the span of their lives. Grief, rage, sadness—it’s all there, on sometimes raucous (yet honest) display. I am not vocal, yet I have suffered. And having suffered, I believe we are connected in a way that the naïve are not.
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