365
It is the day before Halloween, precisely one year ago:
I have sat cross-legged every morning for the past five on the sitting room floor, looking out at the fading Autumn trees. I light a candle in a tall brass-meshed cylinder and I breathe deep with my hands on my belly. And I whisper ‘You are welcome. If you want to stay you are so very welcome.’ A part of me knows she or he can’t stay. There is the blood and the ever-mounting pain. And the scans that show nothing where there should be something. But there is still the pee on the sticks with the smiley faces and the ++’s and the pink lines …
Around 6pm, one year ago:
The pain takes over everything else and we end up in ER. I’m not able to think any more about what may or may not be inside me. It is just the pain that has its source in my lower abdomen on the right hand side, but somehow seems to have consumed me down to my DNA. I am gone, but the pain in every cell remains, retaining my outline. The only thought I have now is how much I long for someone to knock me out and make it end.
Around 11pm, one year ago:
Eventually, they do knock me out, in a sudden rush to the operating theatre. Through my haze I’m impressed by the number of people that are there within minutes, just for me. It hits me that this is an emergency and that I am about to go to sleep and that maybe I won’t wake up and I think of Brian and Max and Martha. Tears drain out the side of my right eye. Some kind kind hand wipes them away. I am so touched by this and hold it as my last thought before the anesthetic takes hold and I drift away.
Around 2am, one year ago:
I wake to the gentle hand of the doctor on my arm and her gentle voice telling me that the pregnancy had been trapped in my tube, or maybe in my ovary, and that the two had twisted around each other into a bright red pulsing ball. And that she had had to take them both out. She is so gentle and kind and I wonder whether it was her who had wiped away my tears earlier.
I call Brian to let him know and he promises to keep the candle in the brass cylinder lit.
October 31, one year ago:
Max and Martha and Brian come to visit me. A jolly pirate and an adorable witch. Brian brings beautiful flowers and Max has made me a salad that he is sure will make me better and a drawing that is a perfect map of my room.
A few months later, April maybe:
We are back visiting Ireland. Brian and I take some of the sky lanterns left over from our wedding (we have lots – it is a bad idea to let sky lanterns off on a Croatian island after a summer of no rain. Fire engines will spend hours following your test lantern around incase it lands and ignites acres of dry brush!). We go to Sandymount strand. The tide is out. We walk to the edge of the water, which in the darkness seems to be continually creeping away. It gets very blustery. We have extra paraffin, which we succeed in pouring all over our hands and shoes and little else. We try to light one lantern and manage to burn it to pieces. The second goes the same way. These lanterns do not want to float out to sea. We decide to give up and I feel a little silly about my idea as we walk back.
And then suddenly the wind drops and everything is still. We have one lantern left. It lights in seconds and fills with hot air and lifts from our paraffin-smelly fingers. I lean against Brian and we watch as it gaily, gracefully travels up and away, not out to sea as I had imagined it would, but back in towards land. The sky is navy and the city gives the odd cloud up there a pink tinge. Our lantern travels higher and higher until it reaches one of the clouds. It hovers there for a moment and then with a wink it slips away.