Six Months

William is still inside me, stuck, a lump in my throat I can't get past.

Today he feels unreal.

Did I really kiss the cooling forehead of my dead baby six months ago today? Did I really hand him back to a nurse? Did I give him to her, as if he were an empty plate and she a waitress clearing what was no longer needed from the restaurant table?

Here, we're done with this, you can have it now.

Was that me? Was that my son?

It couldn't be. If something so horrible, so heinous, so impossible had really happened to me, I'm sure I would never have given him away. I'm certain I would never have handed him over and gone home and watched American Idol and wondered why I couldn't breathe as I laid there in the dark and wished it all away.

If something so unbelievable had happened to me, I'm sure I would have died. I'm sure I couldn't have survived such a loss. I'm sure I would have slit my wrists or been locked in a padded room or been put on serious medication to keep myself from falling apart.

And if something like that, something so unthinkable, had happened to me once, and I managed somehow to make it through, I'm certain that another loss would truly crush me. Even the smallest potential of life, gone in an unexpected rush of blood and tissue, would surely bring me to my knees. I would spend days, weeks, months, completely incapacitated, unshowered, undone.

I did laundry today. I washed dishes. I wrote a poem. I washed one child's face and kissed another's boo-boo.  How is any of that possible?

You're so strong. A rock. I would have died. I couldn't have handled it. I don't know what I would have done.

No. No, you don't. You don't know what you'll do, when you look into the dark, gaping, bloody mouth of your dead son and see the abyss looking back at you. You think you'll go crazy. You think you'll die. You think you will come undone.

But the horror isn't the reality of death, no bigger than a sack of sugar in your arms... the horror is in the living. The horror comes six months later, when you realize you're living your life, still shopping and cooking and laughing and typing and breathing and trying. And failing.

I wish I'd died. Or I wish I had been utterly shaken and changed and transformed into some sort of selfless human tribute to the precious lost life of my sweet, perfect baby.

But I am, still, and that's all. I didn't shatter, I didn't collapse, I didn't rise from the ashes of my dead son like a glorious phoenix. Six months later, I'm just here, and nothing much has changed, aside from the gaping hole in my chest I feel every minute but no one else can see.