Goodbye

It had been a month--the longest month in her life.
One month of empty arms,
Of phantom pains,
Of first seeing the empty cradle,
and then the blank spot
where the cradle used to be.

No baby.

The house was a mess.
The rest of the family was forgotten,
All that mattered was that she went to the hospital pregnant
And came back home empty.

Time ticked on, minute by minute,
Each one longer than the last.
Nothing was ever going to change.
The hole in her heart,
The ache in her arms
The seizing pain in her heart,
She was sure these would stay with her forever.

She knew she should get up.
She did have other children,
a family,
And they needed her, too.
But she couldn't.
She simply couldn't.

And so she sat in the chair,
Staring at nothing,
Until her husband took her hand
And led her to bed.
Where they lay
Two statues
Unable to come together in their grief.

Until one day…

It started prosaically enough.
She had to go to the bathroom.
To get to the bathroom, she had to pass through the dining room.
And so she did,
And suddenly she was enveloped in love.
It was electric, alive, and full of joy.

When it happened, she wasn't sure what to think.
Had she really experienced that?
Had she been--just for a moment--
more totally alive than she had been since this happened--
perhaps
since she was born?

She wasn't sure
So she tried it again.
And again.
Back and forth for nearly an hour, it seemed.

And then,
just like that
it went away.

Gone, but not fully.
Not completely.
The stillness of her heart,
The death of her soul
Was gone,
Replaced by a tiny echo of the enormity of that experience.

She began to heal.
She started cleaning her house.
She went to the kitchen and made dinner.
She took the children in her arms,
And she took her husband to her bed.

Life would return--
if not to normal--
then at least to livable.

Later, friends would ask about the change,
and she would try to explain,
but she'd always end by simply shaking her head.
How could she make them understand?
What could help them comprehend that her baby,
in that electric moment
was saying "goodbye".

Such a hard word, goodbye,
but how important to hear.
For this goodbye, she came to understand,
Was not a goodbye into the nothingness of death,
The stillness of the grave.

It was a goodbye for now,
a passage from life into new life,
And it was a promise as well.

I have said "goodbye", but someday
I will see you again,
And then I will tell you
"Hello!"

I will wait for you.
This was a promise that she instinctively believed.
And though her arms were still empty,
Her soul,
Finally,
Was full.