The last night I am with him, we crowd onto his narrow hospital bed. I spend hours touching and memorizing his face, his hands, his toes. We relish these memories, as impossible as they are. They are the only connection between our babies and us, their parents—a nightmare and a life preserver all at the same time.
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Jesús never wanted to bring us sadness. Like any child, he wanted to be loved and celebrated for who he was. After those first aching months, my heart recalibrated. It is a different heart from the one I had before him. Perhaps it is more reluctant to hope for things, sometimes more fearful for the future. And yet it’s a heart that knows love can be found in even the darkest of places.
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At first the bag is thin—only a membrane, really. You go home from the hospital clutching it in your bloodied hands, gasping at each stinging slice as the glass shifts and stabs with every pulse of your new sack-heart. The pain is astonishing in its intensity. It literally hurts to breathe. It hurts just to exist. And you wonder: how am I ever going to survive like this? How does anyone live with a tender heart filled with razors of glass?
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A year ago
It was my whole body
Bleeding
An endless expanse
Of shared cells
Mine and his
And no one’s
Because even my cells
Tried to stop existing
When his did
Bereaved parents of lost babies and potential of all kinds: come here to share the technicolour, the vividness, the despair, the heart-broken-open, the compassion, and the other side of getting through this mess called grief.
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Parents of lost babies and potential of all kinds: come here to share the technicolour, the vividness, the despair, the heart-broken-open, the compassion we learn for others, having been through this mess — and see it reflected back at you, acknowledged and understood.
Thanks to photographer Xin Li and to artist Stephanie Sicore for their respective illustrations and photos.
: for one and all
: ttc | pregnancy | birth after loss
: not ttc | infertility after loss
: parenting after loss
: on the bookshelf
: how to stop lactation when there is no baby
: how to help a friend through babyloss
: how to plan a baby's funeral
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