Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Preliminary Remarks
Whenever mother and child lose each other, it is a tragedy. Whether through adoption, death, or some other form of separation, the loss is both primary and secondary – it paralyzes when it happens. However, the body and spirit remember the drowning ache of it throughout life, in spirals, sometimes in a new place, when you think it would never visit, and even when you do not recognize its face.
Of course, no one wants to hear about loss on this scale – not really. Not in our culture, where success is measured in how many times you can smile and cheerfully persevere through difficulty. Difficulty in the service of overcoming is one thing. Difficulty in the service of its own sake, in the service of recognizing the horror that can come in daily life is another thing entirely.
Who
wants to wake in terror? To not be able to reach for that flesh that is safety? To be homeless, at least for a time, which can feel like an eternity to the uninitiated.
To be baptized in loss is, after all, to be christened living with a hole in your heart. To go through your life wheezing through the lack, all the while gasping for that elusive full breath.
This Is What It Means to Be Alive
What it has always meant to be alive.
And yet, only some of us are alive.
When We Lost Her
it seemed that I would never have to explain anything again. Why I sometimes fall into melancholy. The single scream in the hospital bathroom. Her fuzzy gray shoes that her brother had picked out, so irrelevant, on the dresser.
She had stopped breathing. Her heart had stopped for some reason at 41 and a half weeks. No one knew why. No one will ever know why.
When I Lost Her
they had pulled me out with forceps. She did hold me, but her hands shook. She did not recognize me, nor I her. The doctor did not speak, the nurse did not smile. No one knew my name, except that I was Lost. Lost in the world. So blurry.
There was a reason for this. It was unfortunate, but necessary. Everything that has happened to me since has been necessary.
When a Thing Is Broken
can it ever be broken again? Rebroken into something new or what it was before?
Concluding Remarks
I have tried to make something of a relationship with my birth mother. It has not worked. I think it is a combination of too much time and too many truths that defy definition — this and the fact that we do not understand each other’s languages.
I have not tried to talk to my dead daughter yet. Some day I intend to. There are things I need her to hear. There are also things I need her to hear me say to her. Not to explain, but to be a witness for each other. To mark this leaving, on and on, but not to dread it.
© Copyright. Gazillion Voices. 2014. All rights reserved.
