Vachon Imagined

I had just lost my second child, and I had to face people who told me it didn’t really matter because I hadn’t carried her that long.

As though time is the only thing that matters when it comes to connection.

I was, and am, connected to her.

All I have to do is see a little girl prancing through an airport, gleefully as though there isn’t another person in the room, dressed in a dazzling sequin dress, and I feel her.

I remember her.

The physical pain of losing her was one thing. The mental pain was another, although both happened in the same place.

The body.

There is nothing happening outside of the body. No other world, no other thing. There is the body telling time, capturing experience, carrying memory.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman, American or Hispanic. You are human, and the body does this.

But when we try to escape the body, we lose our ability to mourn.

We lose our ability to cry.

Humans can only take so much, so we use distraction to help us survive what we cannot yet bear.

I went to work the day after I lost her.

I needed something else to focus on, and for me, that was healthy.

But then I saw everyone.

Their judging eyes.

The people who thought I should be at home. The people who thought it was perfectly fine that I was at work.

And there I was again.

I.

You cannot escape it.

There were people telling me I needed to try again because God forbid my son didn’t have a sibling, as though he would simply walk around empty for the rest of his life.

Maybe he would.

But no matter what my face looked like, no matter how pretty my suit was or how decadent my lipstick, I was hurting.

And nothing helped.

Not people’s opinions.

Not their well-meaning intentions.

Not the casseroles.

I had to learn how to accept that I had lost a child.

And let’s be honest: a part of me felt responsible for it.

I wondered if God was punishing me because I was a bad person, because I had done bad things.

Maybe that was true.

I believe punishment speaks in ways our divided understanding of love never could.

Call it what you want.

I was grieving.

I am still grieving.

Every time she walks through the room of my memory, I grieve her again.

And I accept it.

Not in the way humans usually accept things.

I accept it in the way only God can.