Light

So much has been written about miscarriage this week, this is how I felt…

I wonder if this is how it feels when you are awaiting your own execution. No panic. No fear. Just the knowledge that it will happen. Birth is about life, about immortality. There’s this great female mythology surrounding it. We can all hold hands and chant and it will be wonderful and warm. New life that has come into the world and we will all celebrate it.  

This is about death. What I am going to go through is about what is already dead, a life not started. I kind of knew the day we went for the scan. I heard the words ‘No heartbeat’ and I made a noise and I cried but I knew. I already knew.

It requires surgery to remove it. I did not know that. ‘It’. I call it, ‘It’, because it dulls the pain, but I gave ‘It’ a name. A name I will never speak. A silent name that rings out in my head with pain.

I didn’t want surgery. I just wanted to go home and have a natural miscarriage. You can opt to do this but how do you do this?

You wait. You just go home and wait. You know that it, the thing you are carrying around is dead inside you. It doesn’t need you, not your food and not your comfort. Sometime when you weren’t watching and you didn’t know, its tiny little heart just stopped. You didn’t feel it or sense it at the moment. It was only afterwards, long afterwards that you knew.

I wanted to cry. I wanted to cry a lot but there were no tears. I just had to wait for it to happen. It was just a fact. This baby was dead. It was going to come out of my body. I could not cry. In fact I hardly cried at all. I wanted to. I want to.

It took a lot of waiting for it to happen. I just kept on going. Washing. Cooking. Cleaning. The house was spotless. The meals magnificent. The pain hidden. Waiting.

I wanted privacy. I just wanted to do this privately. In the comfort of my bathroom. It was private. Just me and death and nothing else. There would be no great celebration of life. No celebration at all.

When it happened and it was there dead on my floor, I was so scared I could not even touch it. I was almost hysterical. My husband picked it up and put it down the toilet. Gone so fast. So many words. Down the toilet like a goldfish is all I can think of. I wished I had the courage to at least touch it but I didn’t. I should have touched it, loved it, buried it. Still there are no tears. Life goes on. I have to focus on the child I have not the other child I wanted.

In my head I am standing at the end of the path and screaming into the void. And I think  there is just darkness up ahead. In reality though up ahead someone is building a wall. The path is cut off from here and I have to turn and go the other way. The void is disappearing. The wall is getting higher and I have to turn. I turn my head and there are my husband and my daughter and they are walking and skipping in the light. I turn back to the void. I am screaming at the man building the wall. He builds on and  the wall is getting higher. I have to turn and follow the light. I am screaming at the wall. The wall just gets higher and now I  have to turn and follow them into the light. Still there are no tears and yet- still I have to turn. I am here. The void is gone. The wall is built. I must turn and go into the light.