"What doesn’t / in time enter Grief’s lexicon?"
Danusha Laméris, “Glass”
The first time seeing a new doctor, one of the standard
questions is always How many children do you have? The one
I don’t know how to answer. The naked truth: four,
but one died seems like a blunt instrument, but three
feels like a lie. She notices that my pressure is up,
says she’ll come back for another reading, leaves me
beached in the cold white room. Adrift on an iceberg,
I remember how young I was, how nothing in the Lamaze
books prepared me for the nurse unable to find a heartbeat,
the doctor pretending there was nothing wrong. Until he couldn’t
anymore. What I was like afterwards: an empty shell. And
there were more questions: boy or girl? asked the cheerful
checkout girl at the local grocery; her bafflement when I
abandoned a week’s worth of groceries, unable to stutter
out an answer. And where is she now, my sweet
firstborn, the one I never held, never even got to see?
She swam inside the ocean of my body for nine short
months, safe and warm, but I failed to deliver her to the sandy
shore. Oh, my little starfish, I see you floating in the dark
night sky. Now I count my breaths, and a nurse returns, says
I’m back to normal. Which is, of course, impossible,
in this world without her in it.
