Going Home...

      I saw a discussion on Still Standing, the online magazine about living after losing your baby.  They posed the question, "What did you do with the nursery?" I was going to respond.  I was going to speak of how I left it exactly as it had been before Celia died.  I was going to write of the fact that when people offer to pack it up and store everything away, I begin to cry.  I was going to share that I think I cry because packing everything away is final, or maybe it is because I can't bear the thought of all her things sitting in dark dank room somewhere away from me.  Yet, as I began to write of theses things, I was struck with a larger question.  What do I do about the house?  To some this may seem like an odd question.  But I my labor happened primarily in my home, I had planned it that way.  When I lost my child in the trauma of birth, I not only lost my future.  I lost that safe serene feeling one should have in the comfort of their own home.  In fact, for a time, I could not even enter my house for fear that the memories of loss and pain would envelop me.
     I first reentered my post apocalyptic home, the site of the bloodshed, the site of my loss, in early December.  It had been two months since my daughter had passed and that day was the first time I could cross the threshold and bathe in the pool of emotions that occupied the structure.  Once inside, somehow, it all looked so different.  The home in which I once felt comfort, now felt empty, still.  I walked gingerly through my home afraid to step on and perhaps shatter a memory of the life that had been growing inside me.  The light shone through the small cracks in the bamboo roman shades and gently illuminated the tiny specks of dust dancing through the air.  It felt as if I were standing amidst the fuzziness of a movie's dream sequence.  Not the kind when you, the audience, know everything will be ok, more so the dream that left you with an overwhelming feeling of confusion and uneasiness.  With each step I took, my heart ached a little more.  My eyes, dripped with tears and searched every inch of floor, wall, ceiling, and furniture.  The home, Celia's and mine, seemed familiar yet not; a destination on the opposite side of the looking glass, a sepia colored memory.  I noticed every new scar that my home possessed; the gouges in the walls from the stretcher's clumsy pivots, the broken picture frames that had been knocked to the floor, the paint chips that sprinkled the doorway from the stretcher's frenzied exit.
     My dogs entered behind me.  They stepped as gingerly as I had.  They carried the heaviness of the event on their backs.  Perhaps they remembered the horror.  After all, they had both been present on that day, when life changed, when time stopped.  The two did not know how to behave once inside and therefore chose to lay in the exact spots where they had been when tragedy struck.  After I had completed walking through every room, I was struck with confusion.  Do I stay here now? Do I dare stay at the scene of the trauma?  Or do I return to my parents' house where I feel eyes on me even when no one but my dogs and I are present?  I sat on the cream colored oversized chair in my living room.  I thought about everything and yet nothing.  I gazed off into the room that would have been hers.  I felt a crushing feeling of emptiness.  I wept, then sat silent, then wept.  This cycle repeated itself for hours.  How many hours?  I cannot say for sure, but so many hours passed as I sat there that morning light turned to to evening dark.  And still, when darkness fell I sat longer.  I made no calls that day.  I only sat in my loneliness.