A rocket ship will bring her home

Photo: Sepp Ruiz unsplash.com/@rutzsepp

Former Glow In The Woods Contributor Josh offers us this beautiful piece of writing on his daughter Margot’s tenth birthday.

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A Rocket Ship Will Bring Her Home [or] It’s Been Ten Years Since She Died

I should start by saying that my second child died on March 24, 2011. It was roughly 5:30pm when the unconscionable news suddenly landed on my brain from a sterile hallway outside whatever room they rushed my wife into. This moment occurred roughly an hour after I was playing in the yard with my two year old daughter and her friends. The moment came roughly fifty minutes after the accident. And roughly thirty-five minutes after the nurse found the heartbeat. And roughly twenty minutes after another nurse came running down the hallway and said, “I think I hear crying,” with a big hopeful grin on her face. And roughly five minutes after I screamed for answers and slammed my helpless fists against the hallway walls. And then someone told me that my daughter didn’t make it. And then she, Margot June, all seven pounds and twelve ounces of her, was swaddled and she was in my arms and we were alone in whatever room they led me too. That all happened exactly ten years ago today. And whatever straight line my life was headed in suddenly came to a pronounced and abrupt halt and within a few hours this straight line had cratered and turned and zagged and leapt and crisscrossed the past and the present with audacious and indifferent abandon. By the time they took my daughter out of my arms and wheeled her down the hallway, the line of my life had dumped me in an unrecognizable place and state.

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There is this picture of my wife. She is in the hospital. Third floor. Coronary care unit. It is ten or eleven days after Margot died, after my wife’s body was ravaged by a placenta abruption. Her body is sixty pounds heavier than normal because her kidneys are no longer functioning. The blood running through her veins is fresh from a dozen blood transfusions after the accident that saved her life. She’s draped in a hospital gown that covers up tubes and bags and needles poking from her. Her arms are spread out, her hands resting on the window sill. She is staring out the window, facing the sun. Her eyes are closed. It’s the first time she’s been able to walk from her room to the window unassisted. The moment feels so sacred I don’t dare come close. This wasn’t about me. Or us. Or our family. Or Margot. This was about her contract with the sun, her determination to bypass death. When I asked her how she felt as the blood drained from her body and three doctors and a slew of nurses whirled around us not knowing if she would live or die, she told me she wanted to feel the sun again.

She was standing there in the window, feeling the sun. It seemed like something.

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It was a few months after my subsequent son Leo was born, almost sixteen months after Margot died, when my firstborn, Stella, said something on the way home from preschool one day:

Leo is going to go in a rocket ship and find Margot and bring her home, and me and Margot and Leo will play together and I’ll say, I love you Margot!

Don’t die anymore. Stay here forever and play with us. I love you and miss you!

Thank you Leo for bringing her home.

Don’t die anymore, she said, as if sixteen months later Margot was still dying, a little every day in the tears and emotions and conversations her Mom and Dad were having all around her.

 Thank you Leo for bringing her home, she said, as if Leo and not her, could somehow be the one to rescue Margot and bring her home and make the dying stop.

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You can’t imagine what will come after your life is seized by the reality that your child is dead. You don’t know the pain will get worse. You don’t know how dark the nights will be between the hours of 1am and 4am, when your rational self will be taken over by an imposter who imagines all the ways that you and everyone you love is going to die. You can’t imagine draining the NyQuil bottle to avoid these frequent scenarios. You don’t know that one day the constant California sun, ironically, will shine down mocking rays of crippling warmth on your pain and cause you to temporarily move to a state where the days are dominated by gray skies. You don’t know your wife will make a full recovery. You don’t know about the baby loss community waiting for you or the local support group or the friends you will make who have also had children die. You don’t know how your family and friends will carry and share your grief in a way that makes it feel less lonely. You can’t foresee a lonely stocking hanging on the Christmas tree every year. You couldn’t possibly imagine that for years and years, every time you come across a mourning dove staring at you from some perch, it will feel like her staring at you and that you will start talking to that dove as if it was your daughter. You don’t know you’ll have two more children who live. You don’t know that you’ll have new dreams, eventually, that come out of no where and will infuse a youthful energy and joy in you. You don’t know there will be a day where you and your wife and your three living children will be spending a month every year in a converted camper van, exploring your favorite landscapes, hiking together, laughing, reading, dreaming, sleeping together. You can’t imagine having long family dinners together around a table, sharing stories about the day, rehearsing scenes from Star Wars, coaxing your kids to eat some vegetables. Regular family stuff.

You can’t imagine any of this in those early days when grief is wrapped around you like a tangled thicket of thorns, so you just wake up and get out of bed every day and see how it goes.

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The pain isn’t as pulsating or as steady as it once was. I no longer visit the place we spread her ashes as much as I once did. I used to secretly carry around some of her ashes with me wherever I went. I used to smear them on my forehead so that I could, perhaps, infuse her being with mine, as if there were a chance she would slowly slip away from me. As if I would lose my memory of her. Ten years later this idea seems ludicrous. Because while I was carrying her around in my pocket, afraid of her slipping away, a quiet and methodical transformation was taking place in my very being. The loss of her life and the grief and anguish that consumed me in those early days changed a million future moments and decisions and conversations, as if the incident itself was like a blood transfusion, with all of the before in my life siphoned out through a tube and all of the after in my life slowly dripping in, day by day, month by month, eventually spreading through every vein in my body, every ventricle in my heart and rewiring the neural pathways in my brain until I was nearly a completely changed man.

Ten years later, she lives not just in my memory, but in exactly who I’ve become since she died. No rocket ship rescue required.

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What do you know now that you didn’t know when you lost your baby? If your loss is more recent, what do you anticipate knowing and feeling 10 years out?