Loud

If the silence takes you, then I hope it takes me too.

-Benjamin Gibbard

I have always considered myself a somewhat measured person. I am prone to occasional lapses of reason, but on the whole, I’d like to imagine that I am not a slave to my emotions. In fact, I have spent a good portion of my energy in my life trying to keep my emotions private from others. I jokingly tell my friends that crying is for the shower.

 Bottom line, I like to grieve in private.

 But, I have never felt pain like that. It was like my heart ripped out of my chest and stopped beating in that triage room. Somehow my body walked out, lay down in a delivery suite, gave birth to my dead daughter, picked out her urn, and continued living.

I have never screamed like that. Raw and animalistic, howling without concern for who heard me or what they must think. Echoing down into the deep black hole that opened up below me as I stared at her still body on the ultrasound.

I have never wept like that. It was as if all my love and all my grief for her was too much to live inside my body, and it poured out of me, hot and bitter.

I have never stared like that… upright in a hospital bed, unable to close my eyes, allowing the early contractions to wash over me. Welcoming the pain. My grief became loud. A public spectacle to the hospital staff.

Concerned nurses begged me to take something so I could sleep, maybe some morphine for the pain. Didn’t I want the epidural? In the first eighteen hours of my labor, I refused pain medication, allowing only a Tylenol to counteract the fever from the Cytotec, and finally around four in the morning, a Benadryl so I could have some sleep to prepare for the harder labor to come. I welcomed the pain as it meant that somehow, I was still alive. Somehow, I was still doing something for her. It was the last act of love I could do for my daughter on earth.

Later, at the funeral home, as we looked at urns that fit in the palms of our hands, I turned my tear-streaked face up towards my husband and whimpered, “I wish it had been me instead.”

Tears still leak down my face without warning, and I cannot discuss her for too long without losing my ability to speak. I have never wished to trade my life for anyone else’s, but now I know I would die if it meant Sparrow had the chance to live.

The only cries at her birth were my own, and I never knew they could be so loud.