I Wonder When Your Heart Stopped Beating
I wonder when your heart stopped beating
Was it when I kissed your brother goodbye?
When the silver coin slipped from me to the meter?
Was it when the esthetician softly stroked my cheek?
When my friends hugged me teary eyed after I told them you were a girl?
Was it when my reflection moved in the window, glowing and billowing like an angel?
When I stepped lightfooted onto the sunny cobblestone street?
Was it when I sat sipping lemonade, brimming with a bliss that shouldn’t have been mine?
Why didn’t I feel it, so I could scream and tear my clothes?
Why didn’t my heart stop, too?
This is the day she died. Thanks to the wonders (and, apparently, horror) of modern medicine, I was told weeks later that her heart beat for the last time at some point on the day of July 17.
The terrible, confusing thing is that July 17 had actually been a wonderful day. It was hot and sunny (just the way I like it), I put on a beautiful dress, kissed my son goodbye, and headed downtown to meet my friends at my favorite spa. We chatted and giggled as we put on our robes, tactfully avoiding the sauna because three out of four of us were pregnant.
The esthetician cleaned and polished my skin while I rested my eyes. Yes, I’m here with my mom friends. Yes, we are all having our second babies this year (or plan to). How special. How perfect.
After our treatments, we gathered in the locker room. Someone asked whether I had discovered the gender of my baby. Yes… it’s a girl! We hugged and laughed and cried. I said her name. Mary Elizabeth.
We dressed and walked to lunch. Standing on the cobblestone street, I caught my reflection in the giant windows of the spa. My dress fluttering in the wind, face shining and new. I felt beautiful. Peaceful.
At lunch, I munched slowly, careful not to upset my nauseous stomach. After my meal, I ate an entire cookie. I was hungry after all this happiness. I sipped my chlorella lemonade and smiled. Everything felt just right.
And then I found myself staring at a silent, still ultrasound. I knew before she said anything that my baby was gone. She was too small. Too still. The midwife said nothing and proceeded to take measurements of the baby. 8 weeks 5 days. I did the math in my head. July 17.
Wasn’t I just that woman sitting with her friends, our tiny babies growing secretly inside? Wasn’t I just happy, beautiful, glowing?
Now I was dust. A grave. Alone. And I was then, too, I just didn’t know it yet.
My baby had died inside me and I had been blissfully unaware. What kind of mother doesn’t know her baby has died? What kind of mother feels perfectly happy as her baby’s heart beats for the last time?
The incongruence of this day haunts me. Logically I understand there is no way I could have known. My body gave no sign, no warning. But still I feel I should have known. I should have given her my full presence, holding my hands over her as she passed. I should have screamed and cried out. I should have felt it the moment it happened. And I didn’t.
One thing I think most folks don’t understand about silent miscarriages is how complicated the grief is. It requires reckoning with the fact that you’ve been walking around for days or weeks with a dead baby inside you, thinking all this time they were alive and growing. That you were going to have a baby, and now you’re not. That you still have to deliver the baby who will never live outside you. That instead of delivering with a team of people cheering you on, you’ll be all alone on your bathroom floor. That something that was supposed to feel happy, exciting, numinous instead becomes heartbreaking, dreadful, forsaken, and it is, unbelievably, incongruously, both at the exact same moment.