The Land of Milk and Tears

I heard a baby's heartbeat for the first time since William died.

I thought my own heart would stop.

There we were, sitting and waiting for the OB to come in, and in the next room, there it was, a sudden racehorse gallop... It didn't last long. Twenty seconds, maybe thirty. I froze. I felt like someone had plunged me into ice water. I couldn't breathe, I couldn't move. The nurse came in a moment later and I blinked it away.

Last night I dreamed of that sound, like a drumbeat calling me. I was searching in the darkness, and every breath I took felt as if I'd swallowed glass. Then the sound stopped. It just stopped, and I stood there, paralyzed, unable anymore to follow the sound of his beating heart.

There was just the silence, a stillness beyond measure, and I stood alone, unable to go on. Frozen. Directionless. Lost.

I was crying when I woke up - already crying, my pillow wet.

It was that instant, when we looked for his heartbeat and found only silence, that will forever mark the moment in time I fell, tumbled, was pushed into this land of the lost. Mothers wander here, calling for their babies. The land of milk and tears. We search in vain for the sound of our child's beating heart as a guide. But they are gone from us, silent, behind the veil, no longer in the place where hearts beat and lungs draw breath. They were born into silence, into this world but not of it, their time here spent only as an empty vessel, a tiny boat sailing onward toward infinity.

Like my dream, I cannot follow, but I cannot move forward yet without my heart, the heart that was William, the heart that was supposed to go around my whole life beating outside of my body in his.

I am stuck, frozen in this liminal space, unable to follow the sound of his silent heart and unwilling to leave this place I knew him last.

For me, now, this place is all there is.

This is where I live now.

The land of the lost.

The land of milk and tears.