LJ Idol Week One: Saying Goodbye

At the age of 23, I said goodbye to my children. I had none, but was under the horrible impression that I never would either. I wept. I grieved. I missed the children I believed I would never have.

A few years, diagnoses and medications later, and the possibility of having children of my own began to glimmer once more. I welcomed back the idea, but having said goodbye already, was unwilling to pin my hopes on it. So I suspended my desire, and watched warily to see what would happen.

And then the unlooked for; a plus sign on a stick! One whom I had already goodbyed was here, now, impossibly and inexorably.

But something wasn’t right. The blood, oh the blood. It never stopped, never. For weeks I was a wreck, saying goodbye in my heart every single day while trying to fight in my head what my instincts already knew.

For weeks, I held my little Caedmon within me, hugging myself to sleep every night, as my husband held and hugged me. The doctors told me the heartbeat was too slow. The blood never stopped, never.

I denied my goodbye, even as I repeated it over and over.

One day, the doctors said the slow heartbeat had stopped. Still I held my little Caedmon, praying and hoping and wishing and willing away my goodbye. But the blood never stopped, no never.

They told me I couldn’t hold my little Caedmon anymore. They would have to take my little one from me, because my body wouldn’t say goodbye on its own. And so the child I had not known, but had lost at 23, was once again to be mourned. I wept. I grieved.

I said goodbye.

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