Chapter 9: Everlong

To say that life resumed would be inaccurate, because of course it never stopped—a painful reality for someone in profound grief.

Every morning the sun rose.

Every morning I woke up enduring what felt like an emotional flu.

Every morning I would observe some new way I felt stranger to myself, less known than the day before.

A sweatshirt I used to love I suddenly hated because it reminded me of being pregnant with Vox and the naïve hope I had carried nearly to term. I couldn’t cook because I couldn’t track linearly. I couldn’t take the trash to the curb, let alone go anywhere in public, because I couldn’t stand the thought of being seen. I had no interest in reading a newspaper, or anything else, for that matter, because I didn’t care what was happening outside my own four walls. Even the slightest emotional intensity—anything that elicited even a mildly sympathetic response—would trigger a meltdown. I was afraid to watch TV because I feared a Pampers commercial, or Children’s Tylenol, or Disney Vacations. I couldn’t visit with friends because no one understood. I had no idea who I was. I had no baby. I had no purpose. I had nothing.

It didn’t take long, however, before I began to feel the pressure of the shoulds: I should get up at a reasonable hour, I should eat breakfast, I should take a shower. These seemed like basic things I should be able to accomplish.

I was relieved to get out of bed, because I had already begun to associate it with nightmares and sleepless terror. But that was the only easy thing. I hated doing anything because it reminded me life was moving on and I hated doing nothing because I felt useless, bored, and could only wallow. I especially hated bathing, because it forced me to be with what remained of my body, which felt heavy, stretched, and used. The warm water on my breasts would cause my milk to let down, an unfamiliar sensation I quickly began to recognize for the tyranny it signaled: moments later milk would be spraying from my nipples. During my pregnancy I had worried I wouldn’t have enough milk, but I had too much, a creamy horror that reminded me constantly of all I had lost. I wrapped my breasts in cabbage leaves and drank a sage tincture that was supposed to help make the milk go away, and I hated these things, too. The smell of cruciferous vegetables followed me everywhere and the tincture caused a stabbing pain in my stomach. I stopped taking it after a week or so and relied instead on passive prayers I begged in silence:

“Please make this end.”

“Please give me my baby back.”

“Why?”

I felt a physical void from my shoulders to my hips. Gutted is the word that comes to mind, but my guts were intact. It was a psychic evisceration—nothing more, and nothing less. He was in me, and he wasn’t. I couldn’t get away from it. He was never there.

I no longer felt like a collaborator or co-creator of life, participating with a benevolent force, as I did when I met Jack, and The Musician, when I was doing my yoga teacher training and moving to San Francisco and life felt full of possibility and magic and miracles. I had learned in an instant that life cannot be trusted. I was at the mercy of chance. Vox’s death was the most urgent, powerful reminder I’d ever received of how little control I have over most things, the consequence of which would be crippling anxiety for the first time in my life. Inside my mind I railed against the injustice. Why me? I couldn’t stand to see pregnant women, or women with babies. The sight of a stroller made me enraged, then disassociated. There was nothing I’d ever cared about more than my baby, and I felt like I had failed him. The loss of him was my world.

I started seeing a therapist who said the first six to eight weeks were typically the hardest. I held to that like a raft in a storm, telling myself I just had to survive that long. But after eight weeks, when things seemed to be getting worse instead of better, I started to think more seriously about how I would do it. Exhaust, I thought, would be peaceful. I didn’t want to make a mess or cause a stir. I just wanted life to go on without me, as if I had never existed. I just wanted to sleep, finally, without nightmares. I wanted to know where he went. I wanted to follow him there.