A ferocious wind blew last night. We all slept heavily, and I dreamed. We were in a split level house, on the top floor, and I walked out of the room and down the stairs and heard the sickening thump thump of something heavy and soft falling behind me. Theatrical wails split the air, and actual tears spilled from my actual sleeping eyes while my dream self tore to the base of the stairwell and collected my child. He’s gone, they told me, and I picked him up, and he was as small as my hand. I tried to align his tiny head and spine and hold him tight and still in my two hands and said No. No. We’re waiting for the ambulance. Where are the people who will make him better? Why don’t they hurry? Then it’s later, and I’m remembering that my child is dead, only when I remember what happened my baby is no longer a tiny doll but a raw egg. A raw egg I carried in my pocket, and while playing catch with a football I fell and smashed him. I miss him so much, I wail, and think of my little egg with arms and legs waving at me and laughing. Can’t we piece him together again?
When the real living baby cries and wakes me at 3am, I get up and collect him and feed him and put him back to bed, and the rest of the night I wake up constantly reaching for Patrick, convinced he is Jack about to roll off the bed, down the stairs. I rush through the morning routine, readying the baby, readying myself, but it takes a small measure of courage today to hand him to the babysitter.
A colleague of Patrick died on the first Sunday of the month. He will attend her memorial next week, and then come home and have a drink and watch tv with me.
We have lived through another day. Sometimes it seems so unlikely, so impossibly lucky, that we are all still breathing.