The meatbag
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After her first child, a daughter, was born still in 2013, guest writer Samantha Durante Banerjee found her way to the Star Legacy Foundation and now dedicates her time to advocating for stillbirth research, education, and prevention. Please welcome her for our guest post today.
A funny thing happens when your baby dies: you watch, numb with shock, as your heart is ripped out, still beating, and discarded before your eyes. And then it's replaced with a bag made of meat, filled with shards of glass.
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?
But you keep waking up each morning, still alive, no matter how many times you've begged your god to just end it already. And somehow, the meatbag keeps healing itself.
It sprouts new layers, thin still, but stronger than before, and you grow accustomed to the constant rhythm of pain. You even get brave, start to venture out of the house here and there, gingerly carrying the meatbag as it does its slow and laborious work of toughening up.
Occasionally something bumps you a bit too hard—you glimpse a baby the same age your baby would have been in the grocery store, or knock over a pile of tiny, never-used hangers in the back of the closet - and one of those shards manages to tear through. You marvel at the hurt—a hurt that used to overwhelm every second of your being but, somehow, now does not—as you sit, bleeding, jabbing a needle in and out, in and out, desperate to patch that hole back up, sobbing and hemorrhaging on the floor.
This excruciating process repeats, ad nauseum, for years.
And one by one the crosshatch of a thousand cuts miraculously heal, and your meatbag, now a lattice of scars, has become thick and tough. The glass is sharp as ever, but now you barely notice the fine edges poking and prodding as you go about your life—in fact, you welcome those little stabs when they graze you from the inside, because that's all you have left of your baby now.
And nowadays it's only a good, swift kick to the meatbag that causes any real damage anymore, say, the sight of giggling five-year-olds waiting on your corner, happy-anxious as they board the bus on their first day of kindergarten, absolutely oblivious that there's an empty seat on that bus that should have been filled with your child.
A shard bursts through the side of the bag and the searing stuns you. How did I ever do it? You wonder, pushing that poking tip back in with your fingertip. How did I ever make it here?
And rather than bothering with a needle and thread—as if there were any hope of getting a needle through that stiff, leathery meatbag anymore—you just grab an old piece of duct tape, brush off the bigger crumbs stuck to the adhesive, and plaster it over the tear, confident that this rupture, like all the others, will surely heal in time.
And, incomprehensibly, you realize that you are flooded with gratitude for that old meatbag. "She was here," it reminds you, when everyone else seems to have forgotten. "She was real."
When you talk to your body now, post-loss, what do you say? Does it reply?