CYG Day 3: What It Felt Like

What did it feel like to lose my son?

For two reasons this prompt is the hardest of the whole month. Because how do you describe feeling everything and nothing at the same time? And it scared me a little bit to even think about revisiting the feelings of that moment. Those first days. Weeks. I was a shell of a human.

I looked around the nursery today to see if there was anything that could capture how it felt. And of course, there it was. The sign. The empty sign above the crib. His crib. Baby Brother's crib? 

Emptiness.

Hopelessness.

A sign hung with the intention of holding his name when he got home.

But he didn't come home.

He left the hospital with an employee of a funeral home. 

Guilt.

Horrible, mind-numbing guilt.

I felt guilty that he died inside of me. And guilty every moment after letting him be taken away from me at the hospital. I felt guilty walking into the funeral home to "make arrangements." I knew he was in there somewhere, but he wasn't with me. I remember that I very nearly asked to see him. But I was too afraid. 

I felt empty, hopeless, guilty, and afraid.

"This isn't your fault." Everyone said it. I'd nod. Or maybe I wouldn't. I don't know. I wasn't there anymore. It felt like I had been carried off too. With him. And it wasn't until nighttime came, and the house would be quiet after visitors left or went to sleep, that I'd feel things again. And I'd just cry. I would cry for missing him. Cry holding on to the empty bassinet at my bedside. Cry with my hands wrapped around a too-empty belly. I would cry until my pillow was soaked. I would cry until I fell asleep.

People really do cry themselves to sleep, you know. Because the pain of losing an actual piece of yourself is so exhausting, even crying is too much work.

Then I'd wake up and feel it all over again. The nothingness. The everything all at once.

What did it feel like to lose my son?

It felt like when the life went out of him, the light went out of me.