Today was one of the days when the difference in your pupils struck me, pulling me back to long nights filled with the worry of a dance between nurse and provider. It pulls me back to one particular patient, who had been deteriorating. I fought hard for the man. I knew, deep in my gut, my primal knowing, my trained-intuitive-sense screaming: this isn’t right.
His eyes looked much like yours, and he smiled at me jovially, just as you do. But, he was filled with deep confusion, his brain swelling with blood. I didn’t save him. Though I tried. And when I see that same difference smiling back at me in my youngest son, every cell in me screams: “I cannot look this type of suffering in the face again, not in my own child. Not in someone I love!” How angry I am with you world for even making me consider that it could be true.
The doctor reassures us. He’s fairly confident this is a benign congenital condition. But he’s not certain, with the type of certainty my heart needs. Doesn’t he know I’ve watched too many people die? Uneven pupils the start to many sad, brutal declines? Doesn’t he know that unhealed trauma is flowing forth from my chest, bleeding me dry, asking to pull me deep into despair? Doesn’t he know how familiar I am with made up statistics from doctors who are also traumatized and want to hope for the best?
No. And he doesn’t know that I wasn’t sure I wanted you, but here I am in love, and draped in guilt.
He doesn’t know that my heart has broken a hundred times over people I wasn’t “allowed” to love, people who were not mine, who died far too soon.
He doesn’t know that I’ve been running fast and hard from the big C word for the last four years of my life.
He doesn’t know how your smile fills me with joy that might break me. Aching with love which reminds me of Pony Boy and Robert Frost, and the truth that all I love, I don’t get to keep.
He doesn’t know.
He doesn’t know how full of grief I am about a “maybe”.
I want to soak you in. I want to absorb you into the fabric of my being. The smell of sour milk, your giggles, the way you love to stand up and be a “big tall strong boy” with more pride than any 3 month old should be allowed. I want to keep you. Forever.
And I resent the intrusions on our time. What if this is all I have? But, then my sorrow cuts deep, because what if I lose them too, and I had neglected to soak them in while I had time? I don’t have enough time or energy to soak all of you into me, so that when the time comes, I’ll feel whole enough to let you go peaceably. I suppose that’s annoyingly codependent of me, and no one ever gets to have that.
And what if this tears my already fragile family apart?
He doesn’t know that scheduling a follow-up appointment, to “watch and wait”, brought sorrow brimming through my gullet, to cause me to wretch with the forces of my own pain about uncertainty.
I am trying to embrace the art of surrendering, but right now, I am aching with fear about my beloved little boy. The boy who brought me the stories of Fionn mac Cumhaill (a fitting name for a boy named Finn) and Taliesin, and has taught me that in order to live my life, I have to come back to my art, and embrace that to love is to risk losing.
My prayer is to:
Let my grief run through me,
Carving river beds,
Flowing movement of ecstasy,
Remembering the hard-won nature of life.
Forgiving sorrow
That has clogged my heart, stopped the flow
Of beauty and gratitude
For a fullness of being.
In joy, Forgiven.
Make the pain righteous,
Let love sanctify.
Jess and The Fiat 