Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER
I didn’t know how to tell this story. It’s hard and long and exhausting and it makes me want to cry and cry. The name means so much and I miss them so much. The lost, lovely ones that should be here but aren’t. And there’s no reason why that anyone can tell me. They just disappeared into thin air one day, as if they weren’t there at all. But for a short time, they were here (not ‘there’, ‘here’ I have to keep reminding myself). And I need to call them what they were, and what they still are. I could call them ‘the miracles’, but they are more how they happened. They are, and were, truly beautiful. Not to anyone else, but to me. Tiny little joys of wonder and delight and potential, and all gone so quickly. If they were here, it would be different, I would be different. Maybe my son would be different, my husband different. But they’re not, and we are the way we are.
I think about the flash of light when I first saw them – something of beauty created in something so sterile. How it all works I don’t know, but I am grateful for the science, and the scientists, and the cold, stark labs, the needles, the drugs (oh the drugs), the petri dishes, the tubes, the bloody speculum (even though for the most part I hated that shit of a clamp that threatens to split you in two), and for the doctors who really don’t know my name but invaded me nonetheless to give me my little darlings. I remember these things vividly, but mainly remember how thankful we were, and are, and try not to think back with annoyance, despair or anger.
Actually, it isn’t the process I generally remember, it’s the pain a long time afterwards, when the loss happens. The sharp, acute pain of grief. My first loss was the loneliest, the most despairing and is beyond words to describe. From my broken body and into my arms for a moment, to nowhere at all. How do you go from full to empty, with not having driven in between? The guilt of being the faulty vehicle that you would certainly return, not fit to drive. The second loss was close behind, sharp, painful. And oh shit, the guilt with it all. The third and fourth just added to my soul’s destruction. It was a long time before I came anywhere close to being me again. But not really me, a changed me. One that thinks about who they would have been, where they would have gone. I imagine full of life and spark, much like the bright fleck of life I first saw on the screen.