:: The S.I.C.L.E. Cell ::

:: Saturday, January 30, 2010 ::

It has been 13 years today since my husband and I ended the life of our first child in a second trimester abortion. A day hasn't gone by that I did not think of him/her, want him/her, miss him/her. More important than what we miss is what s/he misses each passing day and year: life and all the wonder of it.

Tennessee, if we had not ended your life in January you'd be 13 in July. I'd have a teenager. It's amazing and sad to think of all that you are missing, because my health care sucked and I couldn't hack a severe case of HG unmanaged and virtually unassisted. These things are no excuse, but I know things could have been different for us, and they are different for many others because of you. Your life, however abbreviated, was and is important. Small consolation.

I think of myself at age 13. The bud began its blossom; 13 is a special time. The last year of Jr. High. School dances. Hormones. Crushes. Cliques. The beginning of so many new and worthwhile experiences. You will miss it all. We robbed you of it. How to navigate life after such a contradiction...

It is my faith that where you are is better. Yet there is still something so sad about you missing this life (and something unspeakably horrible about you missing it on your parents' account). This life is something special. It's such a unique experience and valuable because of that uniqueness. It's more than intuition; God provided for this life. There's a reason. What it is I cannot say. I only know that it is so, or else it wouldn't be--we wouldn't be, this life wouldn't be...but only harps and halos, and it's not. You should be here, like so many other boys and girls, and you're not. And it's a terrible, shrouded reality.

No one remembers except me...and your dad who has not said a word about it, but the crease in his forehead deepens above dark thoughts. I know he knows, for he saw me crying days ago in anticipation. It has been a strange year, this one. I may come to see you soon, if God allows. And you know your aunt, who has lost two to abortion and who yet supports abortion, has only just had a new baby. We thought that sweet little one would come on your day, and oh, what a strange conflict that would have posed with no one at all remembering you and our sorrow, and evermore would rage a family-wide celebration when silently, inwardly your day was upon our minuscule, lonely pair. I prayed so that the bairn would come early or late but not, dear God, on his due date, the anniversary of your death. And lo, the 26th found him squalling at his mother's breast and me desperately grateful. Your day remains yours without distraction or added conflict and pain. Such pathetic consolation, but there it is.

Your dad, brother and sister are out. I have been given rare alone time. Time to spend with the memory of you. Time to wrinkle time and run through impossible schematics. Time to dream of saving your life again and again. Time to imagine complete evaporation of the hideousness that abortion wrought into all our lives. Oh why, why, WHY? All this pointless pain! Such a dreadful waste; your life was no trade. You were the most precious thing I had, and I responded to my crushing by crushing you. So young and dumb, I knew no other way--or more honestly, I would consider no other way. And now I know on the other side of life how late it is. And it grows with each passing year, the gap between us, the furrow of regret. Who says it gets easier? It only grows more quiet. Cancer is often very quiet but will kill one all the same. (Reader, take heed.)

What is there to do but let you rest as you will whether or not I grant it now. So it's hopeless for here. In this life. It is indeed. Abortion has simplified everything in a most awful manner. When you were alive there were unanswered questions; we were in the heart of God's Hand, carried by the waves to where I couldn't say. When you were sadly ended it was hopeless with no chance of arriving anywhere; the bell jar was all. What a terrible thing.

Hopeless. I turn the word over and over. It will not conform. It just won't be anything else. Very stubborn is hopelessness. Very unyielding. You are gone. And I am dead inside somewhere...that part of me that was and is your mother and can't live without you. That part is gone and yet remains; my house is haunted by it's tiny, murdered occupant. And I don't regret those rattling chains a bit, because, as I have told your brother and sister time and again lately, love never dies. Abortion, while the antithesis of love, cannot touch love, cannot damage it in the least, and I am glad of that.

So this evening, in the agony of an empty you-shaped space, I hold the memory of your existence in the impenetrable womb of my soul where love grows safely in the deep black loam of the Restoration that is sure to come.

I am ever sorry, my very precious one. My regret is the deepest chasm.

To you, and to the Restoration,
Mom

:: ashli 7:04 PM # ::
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