International Women's Day

On February 22^nd, 2014, a woman entered a hospital.

It was cold and she was shivering.  She pulled the zipper as high as she could and she wished for gloves and she was careful of the ice on the pavement. 

At the welcome desk she was greeted with a smile.  They asked her name, her doctor’s name, how far along she was and so she told them.  They took her to a small room, took her blood pressure, took her mind to all the places it likely should have been; what was probably happening and what hopefully wasn't.  

The woman followed them to a room upstairs, up an elevator and down a hall.  She passed other rooms and other patients and nurses stations.  Quickly, she donned the gown and she lay in the bed.  As the nurse searched for any sign of life, she stared at the empty incubator in the corner.  At the ceiling.  Out the window. 

The next morning she delivered a baby girl who never opened her eyes.  The woman held her daughter, watched loved ones do the same.  She tried to memorize all the creases.  She wondered if she’d done something, missed something.  She wondered who would hold her when the time came to leave. She wondered how her own heart was still beating.   

The following day, a different woman left the hospital.  This woman is no isolated case, there were millions before her and there have been millions since.  She enters the same car and arrives at the same house full of the same loving faces. She sleeps in the same bed and wears the same clothes and uses the same coffee mug, but she is not the same.

This woman knows that very bad things happen to very good people.  She understands that life, even that of the most innocent, is no guarantee.  She endures one of the most physically traumatic experiences one can possibly endure, and then she places her child, her only daughter, her first son, her identical twins, lovingly, into the ground. 

For a time she stays there just beside, the soft dirt caving at her knees.  And she cries; a primal, guttural sound that only exists in these places.  She has horrid thoughts and vivid flashbacks and heart palpitations, but after awhile she will do the unthinkable.

The birds will remain in the sky, and she will notice.  Her back will straighten and her hands will steady.  She will gather the water from her face, and she will rise.