Finding myself struggling with grief, I have looked online for someone else who has gone before. Someone else who can light the path, rekindle hope. In finding no one with a similar experience, I decided to start a blog. Perhaps it will fill a gap, perhaps only fill the emptiness of my arms as I wait and long for the answers that will only come in eternity.

On Tuesday, January 19th, I went to the doctor because of a persistent ache in my left side. The doctor, upon examination, suspected that the baby I had been carrying for six weeks was lodged in the fallopian tube and that the tube had ruptured. We went to the hospitial and in less than an hour I was sleeping deeply as a surgeon cut into my body. He found that the baby had died two days prior due to the rupture of the fallopian tube and took both my baby and future hope for another in a two hour surgery. The doctor reiterated 3 times that I had lost a "significant amount of blood" and that if we had delayed two hours more, the results would have been "catastrophic."

Under normal circumstances this is a loss worth acknowledging. I am bearing a grief that is touchable, tangible where my child is not. That it is my 13th loss only compounds the aching emptiness. In memory of a child we planned to call Gunner, I wrote the following:

Borrowed Child

a warrior child
knit together secretly
in the shadowy space within
not mine to hold
not mine to keep
only borrowed for a time

the span of life and death
a gulf narrowed down
to a tube a mere 10 centimeters
but he was not mine to hold
not mine to keep
only borrowed for a time

six weeks I carried him
until his home, savagely torn
forced me to give him back
because he we not mine to hold
and not mine to keep
only borrowed for a time

my body grieved clandestinely
blood and sorrow welling, pooling
filling the emptiness
until my heart could release
this child
borrowed for a time