April is the Worst Month

May 3^rd is Flynn’s birthday. The day he was born and the day he died. It is a heartbreaking day for me, but April is the worst month. In April, my body was trying to keep us alive, and we were dying. I suppose this could be seen as metaphorical, but I remember, my body remembers, that in April 22 years ago it felt like it was dying. Now every year that follows, the heaviness of April ends with a crescendo on May 3^rd that brings relief from a month of silent suffering.

 

It is well documented in trauma research that the body holds memory. Babette Rothschild’s work in The Body Remembers or the research and work of Bessel Van Der Kolk in The Body Keeps Score, discuss this very concept. And I can attest that my body remembers the dying and the trying and the suffering that in experienced in April 2002. We don’t talk about it when a baby dies, that there can be dying. It is hard enough to reconcile that a baby has died. But as his mother, I was being admitted to hospitals, going to doctors’ visits and ultrasounds, and attending specialized hospital visits and hearing grim statistics and results. I was tasked with the trying to keep him alive and I felt it to my very bones. It imprinted on me, the seriousness of not just being the vessel for growing him, but having the ultimate responsibility of keeping him alive.

 

My body laid in the hospital beds, it endured the testing, one after another after another. It let them draw the blood looking for answers and watched as they measured the blood that I was losing. I let nurses and midwives hold my hand while I cried and in the next moment smiled with enthusiasm when my three year old came for a visit. I felt the dying intimately. I watched the screens on the machines that were doing the monitoring of both our vitals. I held my breath when a doppler was placed on my belly, hoping for the whooshing of a little heart. I watched the contractions that were coming way too early read out on ticker tape while a doctor signed my discharge papers to send me home. My body was holding the dying and then he was born and he died. 

So now when every April, I am run down, aching, and tired. When I am quick to sob, whimper and cry and when I seek out comfort more than I can provide it, I give myself grace. My body remembers the suffering, the attempt at a miracle, the ultimate loss of a months’ worth of grit, determination, and pain. My body knows what is missing just as much as my heart, soul, and mind. It held him, cradled him, grew him, and tried to keep him alive. It yearned for him, to breastfeed him, hold his hand, walk him to school, play with him, it wanted it all. My body remembers the loss of joy when he was born and the entrance of grief when he died. 

 

Today is May 3^rd, Flynn’s birthday. A day we hold sacred to honour his life in our life. Our son, our child, our baby. Today will be spent embracing the echoes of him in his siblings in our family and in our life. And with gratitude that April has again come to an end.