Grace

Grace, I know you carry us.

-Florence Welch

The nurse, with kind eyes behind her surgical mask, who saw me first was named Grace. How apt.

 She was the one who tried to calm my racing heart, regulate my ragged gasps for air, and she held me tightly as I let out an unearthly screech and lurched forward to my hands and knees when the doctor told me five words that will echo in my head until the day that I die.

 “I’m sorry. There’s no heartbeat.”

 I felt outside of my body, adrift. Somehow present and absent, watching myself from above, detached, as I howled like an animal when presented with the news of my dead daughter inside of me. I screamed and clawed at myself, and it was Grace who managed to bring me back down to earth, back inside of my body, so that I could face what was to come. She didn’t leave my side for the next thirty minutes until my husband arrived, and even then, for the next four hours, the remainder of her shift, she was mostly in the room with me.

 I will never forget her compassion and empathy as she witnessed me living the worst moment of my life, my own personal hell. I didn’t know her beyond those four or five hours that she spent caring for me, but I am eternally grateful to her, and I wish I could meet her on better terms.

To Grace: thank you for holding me together when I was sure my cells would fly apart.