The presence of another's heart

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The presence of another's heart

Jesús never wanted to bring us sadness. Like any child, he wanted to be loved and celebrated for who he was. After those first aching months, my heart recalibrated. It is a different heart from the one I had before him. Perhaps it is more reluctant to hope for things, sometimes more fearful for the future. And yet it’s a heart that knows love can be found in even the darkest of places.

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The meatbag

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The meatbag

At first the bag is thin—only a membrane, really. You go home from the hospital clutching it in your bloodied hands, gasping at each stinging slice as the glass shifts and stabs with every pulse of your new sack-heart. The pain is astonishing in its intensity. It literally hurts to breathe. It hurts just to exist. And you wonder: how am I ever going to survive like this? How does anyone live with a tender heart filled with razors of glass?

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Searching for my son

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Searching for my son

After Patrick’s death, my world collapsed. I went from seeing his care team every day, to not at all. They looked after The Living Babies, and I had now been transferred to the Dead Baby Department. As wonderful as these new people were, I felt like an appointment in a calendar. I had lost the day-to-day banter of the ward. A person was now required to contact me on a certain day to ask pre-prepared questions about my feelings. They had never met my child, yet the ones that had, were now lost to me. My life was now static. I’d lost my people. My house was empty. My baby was dead.

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We need a better word

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We need a better word

The female body is such a powerful, loving-but-stern gate keeper for the threshold of life, and she has an array of incredibly subtle and nuanced chemical tests she runs and reads and runs again. She rarely fails. We may not understand her. But she knows what she's doing. She learned it from her mother, and her mother's mother, back literally to the trees and the caves. She's one of those natural forces we can't negotiate with, we can only sit in awe and wonder and thank her for her work, and marvel over its results, and not so much question her process. We can't fully know it, and we can't fully understand it. We can only admire it. And damn it all, sometimes we're forced to just try and accept it as best we can through our tears.

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