After my son was stillborn, I remember being tormented by one question.
I was afraid to ask it because I so feared the answer.
When I try to remember those first weeks I am often at a loss. Traumatic memory is fragmented. There was a fugue-like amnesia that descended. In my own memory there is, to this day, a lack of cohesion. The days hung together but their substance felt kind of thread bear. I felt porous – as if I no longer knew my place within the universe.
My question had to do with whether I would always feel this terrible.
I wondered desperately whether there was such a thing as the “other” side of this grief.
This is what I obsessed over.
I dreaded nights because I hated the waking up when I would remember all that had happened. So I sat at my dining room able with my arms crossed tightly across my chest my body going rigid from stress.
I am ashamed – as I write this – at how it might seem. I did not want to feel better, necessarily. I only wanted to feel differently than I did. The shock was terrible. It locked me out of everything. Would I ever move from this purgatory of grief that strands people between shock and recognition? I wondered.
Who could I ask?
I wanted to mourn my baby. I wanted nothing more than to take his death on and nurture the grief instead of his physical self.
However, the kind of terrible I felt was distracting me from feeling anything. I hated the feeling of shock because I felt terrible. It locked out but not in any way that felt productive. I felt so shut down. I was out of my mind and of my body. And so I’d sit up nights and try hard to remember to breathe until I forgot again. And so on.
My doctor gave me the phone number of a woman to whom this had also happened. I called her in search of answers.
Will I always feel this terrible? Is there another side to this?
Without meaning to, I had blurted this question.
It hung on the line. The woman paused to consider.
Yes. She said. There is a way through.
I exhaled for the first time in what felt like weeks.
I knew better than to ask her how. I understood that she could not tell me that.
But knowing that there was a way through emboldened me to try to move through the shock and into the grief.
I cried that night – a good deal.
In the years since, I have made a complex peace with loss. I wish things were different and they are not. Weaving this these truths is like tacking as one sails – adjustments are necessary along the way.
But it is possible to reach the other side.
As you travel, my heart goes with you.
How have you gotten through loss? What would you share with others?
Leave a commentPhotos courtesy of I-Stock. Used with Permission.
