Bloody Christmas
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Shell-shocked. That’s the only word to describe the look on her face, that blank, floating-through-space, drowning-in-pure-disbelief, here-but-totally-not-really-here vacant gaze.
It’s been two months and five days, she tells the camera, but looking at her, you’d think it must have happened only hours before.
She hangs each ornament lovingly on the tree, choking back sobs in between, as her husband trails in her wake, lost, trying to pretend this is normal and okay and not some kind of twisted, bizarro-world facsimile of holiday cheer. He looks directly into the lens with surprising frequency, as if to say, “I’m not sure what I’m doing here, either…”
She reads the inscription on every glittering piece aloud, and each time she says her daughter’s name, I see the harpoon plunging into her chest and yanking out the macerated pulp of her heart, again and again and again. I don’t understand how the gaping, ragged hole in her chest doesn’t show up on the film. There should be blood, so much blood.
She tries to force a smile, and it’s so hollow and insubstantial it practically floats off the screen.
Even her voice is wrong, high and fluttering and weak, as I’ve never heard it. If I’d had only the audio to review, I would never have guessed it was her.
Eight year later, almost to the day, it’s hard to believe that the woman in the video is me.
I don’t know what possessed me to film this, the saddest Christmas video ever made.
But then again, I don’t remember much about my decision making at that time in general, beyond operating on instinct and bumbling through the motions. Nothing makes sense anymore, after your perfectly healthy baby dies without warning two days before she is due to be born. Even gravity seemed to have lost its grip on me. All I remember is vacillating between feeling completely outside my body in between brief moments of actual physical pain that was so excruciating that it left me dizzy and gasping for breath.
Needless to say, we were not feeling the ‘most wonderful time of the year’ that year. We’d intended to opt out of Christmas all together, hoping to avoid picturing what should have been – a plump almost-3-month-old gazing up at us from our arms, a drooly baby smile on her face, the warm multicolored lights from the tree reflecting in her dark eyes – and comparing it to what was: a perfect, tiny body, alone in a box in the frozen ground.
But when the ornaments with her name on them began to show up in the mail, we decided that we would get a tree after all. And we would hang them, and her stocking.
And I would capture this on video, for some reason.
Looking back, I think, perhaps, I needed some solid proof that this nightmare was actually happening. My mind had been spinning so fast for weeks and weeks on end to try to comprehend this strange new world, that I was barely tethered to the earth anymore.
I think I needed to document that she had existed. I was so afraid that I had made the whole thing up, that someday she would be only a memory in my head, and that I wouldn’t know if it was real or a figment of my imagination.
I needed to be able to remind myself that others had acknowledged her existence. I was terrified that I would be the only one to whom she was ever real.
And, frankly, I was right to be.
Because as the years have gone on, and her baby brother and sister have made it here alive, and to the outside world we look like a happy family of four, the number of people who continue to acknowledge her existence has dwindled steadily year by year. And it is only because I continue to speak her name – still choking back sobs, my palm pressed to my chest to staunch the invisible flow of my bleeding heart – that so many even do.
But silent nights be damned, because I will not go quietly.
She was real. She deserved to live. And no matter how many bloody Christmases may pass, I will be here to tell her story.
What do you need to feel that your child is acknowledged amidst the rush of holidays? If you celebrate, do you include your baby? How?