I Will Follow You Into The Dark

The time for sleep is now
It's nothing to cry about
‘Cause we'll hold each other soon
In the blackest of rooms

If Heaven and Hell decide that they both are satisfied
Illuminate the NOs on their vacancy signs
If there's no one beside you when your soul embarks
Then I'll follow you into the dark

--“I Will Follow You Into The Dark,” Death Cab for Cutie

Day 3 after my angel baby Thi’s birth. I got discharged on New Year’s Eve. It was hospital protocol for a mother to be escorted out of Labor & Delivery in a wheelchair. Tung carried my hospital bag and silently led the way to the car. I sat there and clutched the green memory box that the hospital gave me. It had two oval frames where you could put pictures, and the nurses gave me a small, knit preemie cap so that it would not be so empty aside from my hospital bracelet and a small one that would’ve been Thi’s, matching the same serial number. I clutched the box to my chest, this badge of honor, this consolation prize of leaving L&D without a baby. 

I stared with jaded eyes at the tired trees that had lost their autumn leaves, of people milling around the hospital, lost in their own thoughts. Then Tung drove me home, the car ride feeling like the end of a chapter in our lives. 

I reached out to my HR department to figure out my leave situation and my boss to say a few things about the work I’ve abruptly left. People are out celebrating the new year and enjoying their lives. Faces upon smiling faces in Facebook photos. I have to arrange to cremate my little girl and put her remains in an urn I’d need to design and have shipped, and yet I couldn’t bring myself to look at.

I start feeling the anger welling up at the sight of bump photos and healthy babies almost carried to term, of those who had been close to my term in pregnancy starting to exceed my milestones for growth. Of memes and jokes about the discomforts of pregnancy while my own bump starts shrinking instead of growing. I struggled not to be that person who hates the world and has nothing good to contribute to it but bitter complaints. I want a wiggly newborn in my arms and suckling at my breast.

Only women who have experienced this type of loss can understand its depths and to what extent we grieve. This darkness tends to “frighten” others who cannot fathom the loss. And no one fully understands it, really. But some of us are forced to live it, and survive it.

 My daughter is gone now, and this well of dark grief remains like a heavy stone I’ve swallowed whole.