March Prompt: Survival
Life, Loss, and Love
The child, hugging his father’s neck, is wearing worn out denim shorts, a yellow ‘t’ shirt, and proudly carries a collection of popsicle sticks, gathered on their beach walk.
“When you go this time, daddy, will it be for a long time?”
“I don’t know, little man….” he says, eyes glistening, looking anywhere but into his son’s eyes.
The soldier feels the fingers of his left hand being squeezed by the woman walking at his side. Not for the first time the same cold reasoning stabs at his soul, tightening in his throat.
His families experience of life is not normal; not the life sharing experience. There have been gaps; gaps as yet unexplained to a child so young.
Just once he would like to say something positive — something like, ‘I’ll be back in two days, son, at ten in the morning, and we’ll go fly your kite, okay?’
That is what his heart is crying out to tell the boy.
“It’s okay, daddy,” said the boy, “Jack’s dad has to go away, too, and Jack comes to play with me all the time.”
The wee lad, seeing another popsicle stick wedged in the sand, wriggles mechanically against his father’s chest and slips from his grasp, rushing away to pick it up before prancing into the shallow waves, kicking and yelling at the sky.
Quietly, into his wife’s ear, the soldier whispers thanks for giving him such a wonderful and forgiving son. She knows his regret: being away on his third tour to Afghanistan, and the Helmand Province for the birth of their second child, another boy.
In his quiet moments the soldier has thought about what it is that takes him away; what kind of obligation to duty takes a strong man away from his child? One day, when his children are grown older, he’ll have an answer to that question.
Right now there is no answer.
How does anyone explain to a child, whose only contentment is to run on the shoreline, the meaning of freedom, of patriotism, and democracy?
I’ll die wherever fate puts me, that’s true, but I’ll live whatever way I can. In any case, I have to go back there. This is the life of a soldier, strange lands, languages, comings and goings, hardships talked of as adventures, and every day I’m fighting for our way of life, for the world to be more agreeable.
He strolls arm in arm with his wife, watching as their son shrieks at the waves, and imitates the barking of seals basking on the rocks.
Two months later, she’s almost full term into her pregnancy.
The officer spoke quietly, an accompanying priest stood at his side.They told of her husband’s courage. He had paid the ultimate price for freedom and the nation owed him a debt of thanks and honor.
Sickness gorged into her mouth. The need to live disembarked as she sank into steadying arms.
It is ridiculous to think of him dead, never to return to a home smelling of pastry, furniture polish, and freshly laundered clothes.
The next week she lay in a hospital room, receiving full time maternity care. Not a day passed without family at her bedside while her son is staying with Jack’s family. The priest visits her each morning till she can no longer face him or believe in his voice.
Her thoughts are elsewhere than heaven. Who will tend the brambles overgrowing the garden, strangling the daffodils, pushing through the last foam of winter. What about the loss of his affection, the future, and the strength of his love?
Her body has served as accommodation for nine months, a secure world of love and hope and future. Suddenly, and without warning, that same place became one of turmoil, sickness and grief.
With only a blanket of vernix and a child’s instinctive need to survive, life teeters, fighting through stomach cramps, grasping hold of destiny — to live and breath in another world.
She leans back, sweating profusely, not caring to breathe the way instructed.
She does not want this child. She does not want to live.
She has lost the will-power to survive The weakness of her body. She is not thinking about life, about her six year old, about their future.
In her heart the shining song of sorrow, of grief, will not fade.
The uterus continues to cause discomfort, ligaments have loosened and the pelvis begins to relax. It’s time. Pain relief is shunned. The midwife alerts the team for a possible emergency caesarean section. She does not want to push, she wants to die.
No pain can possibly match the needlepoint of her loneliness.
The midwife knows, want it or not, this baby is going to fight for its destiny. There is nothing a mother, even one sick with grief, can do to prevent this miracle happening.
It is the incarnate delight of all things that abide.
Pain comes like madness. Then gone. Her body absorbs it without somehow dying. She simply cannot face the terror of yielding to childbirth alone, and when the storm fills her stomach she remembers only the sound of their first summer, the fecundity of living inside her husband’s love, and pain subsides to weariness.
But pain, this ancient pain of mankind, with all its genuflection survives grief, cares nothing for the ghastly gaiety of death.
In one surge of immense splendour, a child asks to be born, carried through a birth canal on the banner of fearful ecstasy. Legs shake, features contort like grotesque sculptures of pain, sinews strain, urine, blood, faeces, congeal on the sheets till the bed looks like a scene of slaughter.
In the turmoil, a baby boy is born between her legs.
Energy drains into a well of sleepy satisfaction and contentment. It is him, a very special little boy between her trembling thighs, and the room is suddenly overwhelmed with happiness.
She holds him, his slippery little body, tight, tight to her chest. His smell is that of sweet vanilla. Her eyes, tired and heavy adore the moment.
The child is removed, cleaned, wrapped and given back to her.
But there is concern.
The placenta is still fast in her uterus. The midwife tugs on the cord gently, over and over again. She presses her fist down on the abdomen in a last gasp effort to pressure its removal. The bleeding is excessive…sieving out between her legs. In the sudden pain of pressure her flailing arm strikes the mid-wife as that pain violates what she can stand.
The placenta has to be removed if she is not to bleed to death.
Finally, hopelessly, she breaks down, tears running down her face, mucus running into her mouth, all her bodily functions running unchecked. It is the final degradation.
The child is now not the concern.
Though numb, exhausted and confused the fear strikes at her again; the fear of never waking up to be with her son.
She cries her heartbreak. “My boy…” and then, in a moment of descending calm she wants only to live, to protect her sons, keep them from evil, love them always…survive grief for her husband’s children.
