Jan
14

Mirror.

Ames Michel

Two years ago today, I left work around noon. I didn’t know it, but it was my last day. I drove to my doctor’s office and chatted with the nurse while she slid an ultrasound transducer along the jutting camel’s hump of my belly. Then there was the doctor:
You can see here, he said, pointing, the fetus is demised.

Two years ago today, I called Scott and told him to come, because one of the babies had died. After I hung up I realized I hadn’t said which.

It has been two years since we lost Ames—or, more accurately, since we discovered that he had slipped away from us a few days before, without our notice. Maybe while I was eating or watching television or typing, like I am now, on this two-years-later morning. A few minutes ago I opened my feed reader and, through Mel’s Lost and Found, discovered that a woman named Eve went to an appointment, like mine, and lost a little boy, like Ames. His name was William.

Her daughter, Abigail, is still swimming inside of her, and oh do I wish I did not know exactly how that feels. Like standing at the edge of a cliff eroded by hard rains. Blindfolded. In a windstorm. After a vertigo-inducing spin.

I don’t know Eve. But now I keep composing and deleting letters to her in my head.

I can’t promise that her daughter will be safe. She is two weeks further along than I was, past the hallowed mark of viability, but anyone who has been in a NICU knows this is no guarantee.
I can’t reassure her that despite what she wrote in her entry, she WILL be able to hold her son, and have his footprints taken. Those are Ames’ prints at the top of this post, but who knows what euphemistic changes would have occurred if Simone stayed put until the end?
I am uselessly lacking in clairvoyance.

I can tell her that it happened to me. That it was a terrible time, but I survived it, as people do, whether they want to or not. I can tell her that whatever she feels now is just what she should be feeling, and the same goes for tomorrow, and two years from then. It’s okay for her to be grief-stricken over William during her daughter’s triumphs, and it is also okay for her not to be. It’s okay for her to alternate between the two. Celebration isn’t a betrayal of grief, and grief isn’t a betrayal of joy.

Birth and death don’t belong all bundled up together in such a way, and however you sort it all out is your own business, to be done in your own way, in your own time.

There is no script for this, which will make people uncomfortable, but it is not your job to make people comfortable.

The ones who matter will be there in whatever way you need them to be, to laugh or cry or hope or despair, or to do all at once. And I am here too, if you need me. I am a font of anecdotal evidence and obsessively researched statistical information.

Kind people of the Internet, you held me up during my Dark Time. Please, if you can, stop by and link some virtual arms around Eve, today. It means more than you think.

By Alexa | Posted in Ceci N'est Pas Une Ecrivaine |