Time Is a Teacher.
NOT A HEALER.
WARNING: This post may help someone trying to understand life after a great loss. This post could also make someone feel worse, bring up thoughts and feelings that want to be left alone. I hope it helps. I am deeply sorry if it doesn’t.
March 11. March 25. I shake my head at the thought of making this public. I have to DO something with these thoughts. I hope I choose wisely.
March 11, 2011 was the first day of my 3rd niece’s life. March 25th — the very same month of the very same year — my 3rd niece’s life ended. She was born 20 minutes from where she died. Airlifted from one hospital to another, she went into cardiac arrest four times while in transit. Four. Times. She was one day old. She had more heart attacks than days on the planet in that short helicopter ride.
We knew she was going to struggle after her birth, but no one could tell us specifically what the problem was, why she was missing part of her heart or even which part hadn’t formed correctly. I remember thinking how much I hate doctors. I remember thinking that ‘science’ hasn’t come as far as the media would have me believe. I remember feeling an anger I could not understand. I needed to DO something with my energy, but there was absolutely nothing I could do.
The doctors knew the risk of performing their battery of tests while my niece was supported by her mother’s generous heart. They didn’t even know what they were looking for and even if they figured something out, it wasn’t going to change a single thing for my niece or my sister. I was supposed to protect her, but I couldn’t DO anything. My sister did the bravest thing I’ve ever seen a person do in my life — she refused the tests. People told her she was “crazy” and “wrong” to her face. Behind her back they were even more cruel, as if they knew what they would do in her shoes. That is not possible. It just isn’t. And I found something to do. I could go around telling people to shut their mouths when they judged her, I could encourage her and tell her that she was doing the right thing. And so I did.
From Mid-January to March 11, I did what I could, I reminded my sister that she was ‘mom’ and that means she knows best. I reminded her that doctors are human and don’t know what they think they know. I told her it would be ok. It was not ok.
The two weeks between my niece’s birth and her death were excruciating, but sometimes oddly joyful. The idiot doctors finally figured out what was missing — everything except the right chamber. They said she might survive. They said surgery was still an option. They said that for a few days, then they said they weren’t sure, then they said they could repair her heart and even told us how they could do it. They performed an MRI and found out that her brain had been deprived of oxygen to the point that if she did make it, her life would be very difficult. Only thing we could even hope for at that point was that she would make the decision to go on her own. That my sister and brother-in-law would not have to make that decision. The doctors wanted them to decide.
I then watched my sister make another one of the bravest decisions I’ve ever witnessed. She decided to wait to make the decision until Friday, March 25th. At 2:26pm, my niece decided for her. I held my niece for the first time at 2:35pm. I rocked her. I sang to her. I have no idea why. She was gone.
Today is my niece’s fifth birthday, or would have been anyway. To anyone who ever said, “time will heal this” or “time heals all wounds” or any other thing like that — stop saying that crap. It isn’t true. It simply isn’t. The pain doesn’t go away. It stays with you. Experiencing helplessness like that leaves an open, oozing and infected cut on a person’s very core. Stop saying that crap.
Five years later, what time has done is changed me. And the pain from my open sore has changed too. I don’t feel guilty anymore for feeling normal in that spilt second after I started to get out of bed and when I was jarred awake by the crushing reality of not knowing whether my niece would live or die that day — a morning ritual in those two weeks after her birth. I am less afraid to talk about my niece with my sister. I am less worried that my sister, my niece’s (at the time 3-year old) big sister and her dad would fall apart out of grief. I am more grateful to have met my niece and I understand better what she came here to do.
It doesn’t hurt any less. There is no “healing.” Or healing is a misnomer at best. Life does not go back to the way it was before. How could it?
Other things I learned include the fact that pregnancy is a state of limbo, that if the mom-to-be isn’t blessed with patience, a mother could mistakenly wish her own life away by her desire to meet her child — I was like that with my son — wanting to just ‘have him already’ so I could ‘go back to normal’ or feel more like ‘my old self.’ That also does not happen. Ever. What I learned is that there are two things a woman never recovers from:
- Having a baby
- Losing a baby
My advice to anyone trying to make sense of something like this is just stop. Learn to live with your pain, embrace it because it is a part of who you are now. Don’t wish yourself into the future out of the discomfort of ambiguity. Understand that sometimes that ambiguity as uncomfortable and unsettling as it is, acts as a protective barrier and keeps you safe from the full force of your pain. Know that you can live with it, that you can learn to be happy in it and sometimes you will even feel joy that you love someone else so much that you’d choose to live with the pain of losing them over never having them in your life, if only for a moment.
Knowing them for two short weeks, two short hours, two fleeting minutes, or seconds or the months you carried them in your womb is worth the lifetime of grief after they depart this Earth. Know it is worth every tear, every nausea filled day. Know that child will always be a part of you. Give yourself permission to embrace the pain you feel because it is born from the knowledge that you love the one who’s missing.
