7 days

It’s been a week since I lost you, JJ. It feels like a matter of hours. The week just blew on by, and the huge gaping hole where my heart used to be has yet to form any softer edges, and nothing has scabbed over. I’m still just bleeding and bleeding and losing blood from the hole in my heart like the day I gave birth to you, and I’m just biding my time until I die from blood loss or I stop bleeding. I have no preference for either outcome. I could just as happily join you in the ground in Fallon, or stay here unhappily in this dreary life, waiting out my time to be with you again. The apathy feels like a betrayal of your memory.

My body is so weak and frail- I feel like the physical illness I’m suffering is a mirror for the illness my soul is suffering. My body will get better before my soul, I know. But I sit here, wearing adult diapers, because my pneumonia causes me to cough so hard I lose control of my bladder, and the three antibiotics I am on cause me to lose control of my bowels, my head aches, my breasts are hard and heavy and hot, and if I miss my dose of Advil, my fever spikes right on up. At least I quit vomiting two days ago. I wonder if this is similar to the upheaval and pain you must have felt during that excruciatingly long labor I went through a week ago. Everytime I see fecal matter in my Depends, or manage to make it to the toilet in time, I remember the meconium I leaked during the very end of the labor here at home. I think how scary it must have been for you, and I ache at the thought that I never got to comfort you after labor- you had already died by the time you were born. I think the time has blown by because the day after I had you, I was released from the hospital. I immediately went with your father to the funeral home to make arrangements, and then home to eat and sleep. By 11 pm that evening, I was being transported to another hospital by EMS for a 2 day stay- a uterine infection had set in. I just struggled to tell everyone around me what I needed help doing, while I felt guilty because these people needed to rest and grieve, too, but getting you buried in honor mattered more. I was so afraid on Sunday morning when Dr. H said that she’d discharge me by Monday morning- your funeral was on Monday! Then she changed it and said she’d let me go that evening- I ended up not getting home from the hospital until midnight. I was running on fumes by this point, and the cough had set in.