I used to believe that losing my husband was the worst thing that could happen to me.
I was wrong.
I learned that while holding my newborn daughter against my chest, watching her struggle to take a breath.
Her name was Ada June Mercer.
I had chosen that name before I ever saw her face.
I had imagined saying it when she woke in the morning, when she cried for food, and when she grew old enough to answer me.
Instead, I said it while she was dying.
She lived for two hours and nineteen minutes.
I knew the exact length because I kept asking how much time had passed.
I wanted every minute accounted for.
I wanted proof that she had been here.
That she had not been something I imagined during those months when I carried her beneath my heart.
She was so small that I could hold nearly all of her against one arm.
I remember her ears.
That sounds like a strange thing to remember about your dead child, but I can still picture them more clearly than almost anything else.
They were soft and finely shaped.
I touched the edge of one with my fingertip.
Then I counted her fingers.
Five on one hand.
Five on the other.
I counted them again when she moved.
I knew there were ten.
I simply could not stop checking.
Her little hands opened and closed against my skin.
Once, she turned her head toward me and moved her mouth as though she wanted to nurse.
I brought her closer.
I waited for the small, ordinary thing that every mother expects.
But Ada could barely manage the effort.
Her breathing came in short, uneven movements.
I could feel them against my chest.
I watched her face because I was frightened that looking away would make something happen.
I was already frightened of too many things.
Five months earlier, I had buried my husband.
Thomas Mercer had been the person who made ordinary days feel manageable.
He was not a man who spoke constantly about his feelings.
He showed them in the things he did.
And when he was alive, I had never imagined how much silence one person could leave behind.
He died on a logging road.
A wagon overturned, and by the time I understood what had happened, there was nothing left for me to do.
There was no final conversation.
No chance to ask him to be careful.
No chance to tell him again how much I loved him.
I was twenty-seven years old.
I was pregnant.
And I was suddenly expected to know how to live without my husband.
People could call me a widow.
I could barely make myself think the word.
For weeks, I still caught myself expecting Thomas to come through a doorway.
I listened for sounds that were no longer coming.
Sometimes I turned toward an empty place before I remembered.
That was how grief worked on me.
It did not always arrive with tears.
Sometimes it arrived as a habit that had nowhere to go.
The child inside me became the one thing I could still imagine ahead.
I was ashamed of how much I depended on that thought.
Ada was never supposed to replace her father.
No child could have done that.
But I believed she would give me a reason to keep making plans.
I thought I would tell her about Thomas.
I thought she would grow up knowing his name.
I pictured his Bible in her hands someday.
I imagined explaining why I kept it.
Those were not grand dreams.
I wanted mornings.
Meals.
A child growing larger while I grew older.
I wanted the chance to become someone other than a woman people felt sorry for.
Then Ada was born.
And something was wrong from the beginning.
I understood it before anyone explained it.
Her breathing did not sound right.
It was not the steady breathing I expected from a newborn.
There were pauses.
There was effort.
And there was a terrible weakness in her little movements.
I held her close because I did not know what else to do.
I had carried her for months.
Surely my body ought to know how to keep her alive.
That was what I thought.
Looking back, I can see how desperate that reasoning was.
I had no understanding of what was happening inside her chest.
I only knew that she was mine.
And that she needed something I could not give.
The midwife was there.
A doctor examined Ada.
I remember watching their faces instead of their hands.
I kept looking for some small change that would tell me things were improving.
I wanted one of them to smile.
I wanted someone to say the danger had passed.
Nobody did.
At one point, I asked whether Ada was cold.
I cannot remember what answer I received.
I only remember drawing her closer.
Her cheek rested against me.
I could feel the tiny movement of her mouth.
She was trying.
That is what made it so unbearable.
She was not simply lying still.
She was making an effort to stay in the world.
And I could do nothing but hold her.
I kept speaking her name.
Not loudly.
I did not want to disturb her.
I told her I was there.
I told her she was my little girl.
I told her things that mothers say without thinking because there is supposed to be time to say them again.
I had no idea those words would be nearly all she ever heard from me.
The room felt strangely quiet.
Every small sound seemed important.
The movement of cloth.
A breath.
A foot shifting on the floor.
I remember feeling that everyone else knew something I was not ready to hear.
I did not ask them to tell me.
I was afraid they would.
For two hours and nineteen minutes, I remained her mother in the way I had imagined.
I held her.
I watched her.
I studied every feature I could remember.
And then her breathing stopped.
There was no moment in which I understood it neatly.
No clear boundary that made sense.
One moment I was waiting for her next breath.
The next, I was still waiting.
I kept holding her.
I remember looking at the doctor.
He looked back at me with an expression I could not bear.
I wanted him to do something.
Anything.
He explained afterward that her lungs had not developed enough to work properly.
They had never opened as they needed to.
There was nothing that treatment could have changed.
He said it carefully.
I understood the words individually.
Together, they meant nothing to me.
I had spent months preparing my body to deliver a child.
And after all that time, there was nothing anyone could do to help her breathe.
I remember thinking that someone must have made a mistake.
Not because I had evidence.
Because the alternative was impossible to accept.
Surely there had to be a medicine.
A different method.
A more experienced doctor.
Something we had overlooked.
But there was nothing.
No remedy that had been withheld.
No action I could have taken.
No amount of pleading that could have changed what her body was able to do.
The doctor told me I could not have prevented it.
I wanted to believe him.
I also wanted someone to blame.
Those two feelings lived beside each other, and neither one made the other disappear.
The midwife eventually took Ada from my arms.
I had known that moment was coming.
Still, when she reached for my daughter, every part of me resisted.
I had held Ada for so little time.
I had not finished looking at her.
I had not memorized her face well enough.
I wanted one more minute.
Then another.
I wanted time to stop being something people could take away from us.
But my arms loosened.
The midwife lifted her.
And suddenly the weight against my chest was gone.
That was the part I had not expected.
Not the sight.
The absence of weight.
My arms remained curved as though she were still there.
I could feel the warmth where her body had rested.
I looked down at my empty hands.
They had held my whole future.
Now they held nothing.
I had thought I understood loneliness after Thomas died.
I had been wrong about that too.
After his death, I had still been carrying Ada.
There had been movement inside me.
A small reminder that I was not completely alone.
Even on my worst days, my body had been occupied with keeping another life alive.
Now there was no movement.
I could sit still and feel nothing except my own breathing.
It made me angry.
I was breathing without effort.
My daughter had fought for every breath.
I could not understand why something that came so easily to me had been impossible for her.
People told me to rest.
They were right.
I had just given birth.
My body needed care.
But rest sounded like something a person did after finishing useful work.
I had brought Ada into the world.
And I had watched her leave it.
I could not make those things fit together.
I did not know what to do with my hands.
I did not know what I was meant to think about when I woke.
I did not know how to answer the simple question of whether I was a mother.
Ada had been real.
Her fingers had opened against my skin.
Her mouth had searched for me.
I had loved her before she took her first breath.
And yet there would be no child for anyone to see beside me.
That troubled me more than I knew how to explain.
I was afraid people would remember only that my baby had died.
I wanted them to remember that she had lived.
Two hours and nineteen minutes.
I kept returning to those numbers.
They were small enough to sound cruel.
But they were hers.
Thomas had died before he could see our daughter.
Ada died before I could tell her who her father had been.
The two people I had imagined building a life with were both gone.
And I was still there.
I did not feel fortunate to have survived.
I felt confused by it.
I could not understand why the world expected me to continue as though my life still had a shape.
But it did.
There were arrangements to be made.
A burial to face.
Other people's voices.
Other people's footsteps.
All those necessary things went on while I kept thinking about a pair of tiny ears and ten perfect fingers.
I wanted to hold Ada again.
Not to change anything.
Only to make sure I had not forgotten her.
I was frightened by how quickly memory might fail me.
I knew I would remember her name.
I knew I would remember the time.
But what if I forgot the shape of her mouth?
What if I forgot how warm she had been?
I had already lost Thomas's living voice.
I knew what memory could do when it was the only thing left.
The day we buried Ada came far too soon.
I did not feel ready to give her to the earth.
I had barely been given time to welcome her.
But no one could offer me a better day.
There was no day on which it would have been easier.
I had to accept that the daughter I had carried for months would never come home with me.
I could not change it.
I could only keep her name.
Ada June Mercer.
My daughter.
My little girl.
I thought that burying her would be the hardest thing I would ever do.
I did not yet understand what would happen to the part of me that was still trying to keep her alive.
Source: life5.aubtu.biz
