Unbreak My Heart

Take back that sad word goodbye
Bring back the joy to my life
Don't leave me here with these tears
Come and kiss this pain away
I can't forget the day you left
Time is so unkind
And life is so cruel without you here beside me

--“Unbreak My Heart,” Toni Braxton

Day 5 postpartum. I half-assed everything I needed to get done. I gawked at the maternity leave forms HR sent me, paid 2 out of 3 bills, got about 5 questions in from my son’s online pre-check-in forms for his upcoming well-child checkup, and called up 2 more mortuaries to check prices. Weird facts I learned through the process of having to arrange a funeral:

• Depending on the mortuary you choose, you may also have to also select a cemetery for internment of the body. Some mortuaries only handle rooms for a memorial service and the actual cremation, but do not have land for a burial or where to commit an urn. However, lots of mortuaries are business partners with, or are owned by, local cemeteries. Therefore, it is possible to get a discount for services purchased across the same “sister mortuary/cemetery.” 
•  Some mortuaries only handle the cremation of adults and not infants.
• “Miscarriage” is the term for a pregnancy loss before 20 weeks’ gestation (what is considered mid-term in pregnancy). “Stillbirth” is the term for a loss after 20 weeks.
• Before the 20^th week, the fetus is thought to not yet feel pain. That is why in certain states, abortion becomes illegal after Week 20.
•  A death certificate is needed for fetal demises occurring at or after Week 20.

Evenings and nights feel a little better. My body is still used to the routine of us being together as a family to unwind after work, of cocooning ourselves in bed to read my son his bedtime stories, enjoying one episode of a show together, and falling asleep. The worst is waking up at any given time from a deep sleep and remembering. The brief disorientation, the dread, the hopelessness.

It poured when I was clipping Luc’s fingernails as he lay sleeping. I went to the window to look at the rain, for a brief bit comforted that it’s an excuse to push off touring cemeteries for Thi. But then a flutter of panic arrests me as I think about her still at the hospital, no mommy and daddy to keep her warm. I went back to bed to seek solace in my son’s warm body. 

Outside, the sky is crying.

Don’t Blink

Trust me, friend, a hundred years goes faster than you think
So don't blink . . .

'Cause when your hourglass runs out of sand
You can't flip it over and start again

--“Don’t Blink,” Kenny Chesney

I spent the morning looking up mortuaries. We did a radial search on Google maps from the big list the hospital gave us and narrowed down to eight closest ones. I called them to get a sense of costs for cremation and a memorial wake/viewing room. 

“Is the person already deceased, or are you looking ahead?”

“Is it for an adult, or a baby?”

I can barely process the voice at the other end of the line, rattling off package prices and what they include. Embalming. Makeup for the deceased. Internment fees such as opening and closing the niche or tomb. Legal paperwork.

It’s for a baby. My baby girl. Yes, my daughter is dead. She died inside me. Her body, what’s left of it, is in a cold room at the hospital where I left her. I am here, and she is gone. I feel helpless, staring down this monumental task of arranging her funeral.
 
It’s all the energy I have for today. Afterward, I slept for two hours and woke up still feeling drained. My husband calls out to me often, and every time, he pulls me from being so far, far away.

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.