Freedom Found

Freedom Found

I lost three.
Two girls and a boy,
The boy first, Keith.
He cried so loud when he was born,
Twenty-three weeks gestation,
Less than five hundred grams,
Almost forced to decide whether to treat him,
Rejected by the children's hospital for care.
Next came Claressa.
Also twenty-three weeks,
She never even cried.
She just died.
Both in my arms where I could hold them.
The last was Emma,
One night I could just couldn't breathe,
I stripped my clothes off,
They were strangling,
Wrapped myself in a sheet like a Roman citizen,
Didn't help,
Called the ambulance,
Tried to pull off the oxygen mask,
I just couldn't breathe.
We flew down the road,
Sirens wailed.
I prayed,
For my living children,
And my husband,
Then things got very blurry,
But I knew when I was safely in the hands of the hospital,
Oxygen SAT of seventy.
I went to sleep.
When I woke up,
I realized I was alive.
My doctor spoke words in my groggy mind,
Peripartum Cardiomyopathy.
Pregnancy related heart failure.
I lost consciousness again,
Next time I woke up I was alone,
I wanted to scream and cry in frustration,
How were my living children going to do without me,
Was my husband going to have to raise them without me,
Panic began to crawl its way up my throat,
Like bile burning my chest,
It was at that point I realized that if I got upset,
If I let that panic take over,
My baby would die,
I would die,
But I was unimportant.
My baby was important.
My family was important.
I knew where I was going,
But they would not be able to raise themselves,
My husband would be alone,
While I would be living eternally in joy,
It wasn't fair you see,
My baby would have no years to grow,
Her beautiful eyes would never light,
I knew they were beautiful,
Though I had never seen them,
Matching ones to my beautiful girl at home,
I couldn't know the futility at the time,
So I fought the panic,
I calmed down for all of them,
I calmed down because I loved them,
And I started to recover,
A week went by, and I felt steadily better,
Under expert care,
And one morning,
About five am,
I suddenly felt my daughter moving violently,
I smiled,
And thought,
"Calm down, baby girl",
And then nothing more,
"She went to sleep",
I thought.
Later that morning after breakfast,
My husband was at work,
They came and listened to her,
Then announced that they,
Were going to give me an ultrasound,
Instantly I worried.
They steared me down the the hall,
Into an ultrasound theater,
The nurse begins the ultrasound,
I look at the screen which she had facing me,
I could see there was no heartbeat,
I had four living children,
And two dead children,
No,
Make that three,
I knew right then,
As the tech looked horrified,
And fairly ran from the room,
I called my husband,
And told him I thought our daughter was dead,
I was right.
He came right to the hospital,
And we received the news,
As if I didn't know.
Because of my heart,
In a few days they would surgically removed my daughter,
My precious daughter!
Just as precious as any of my babies,
And the next thought came,
There is someone dead inside me,
And I wanted to scream,
But even now,
The other precious ones held sway in my heart,
As I knew I still held their futures in the power of my emotions,
So I squashed it down,
I buried that horror,
As deep as I could,
Since I felt like a mirror taped back together.
Then they drugged me and gave me a heart cath,
To see if I could survive surgery,
And the next day the delivered my Emma,
She was so painfully deformed by decay,
And the reason she passed,
The reason for it all,
Was a message from God for me,
Her umbilical cord was tied in a knot,
The shape of a perfect heart.
The movement I felt early that morning,
Was clearly my darling girl,
Struggling as she died,
Lack of oxygen,
And I knew how she felt.
I recovered slowly,
And my Cardiologist,
Who happened to be a specialist in Peripartum Cardiomyopathy,
A few weeks later told me,
That if I had carried my darling to term,
My heart would have been permanently damaged.
And the heart was for me.
I knew that God was helping me understand.

So you see,
I understand chains of memory,
That clutch and blind us,
I understand how death can grip us,
In unseen bondage,
I could writhe in it's grip,
If I chose to linger,
I could let death hold me back from the rest of life,
I could wrap myself in those chains,
And lose the beauty for the darkness,

However, that would nullify it all,
The gift of life,
The sacrifice of life,
The blood shed,
So that I,
Could have assurance of their disposition,
And my future with them all,
Forever.

And so I broke those cords,
With purpose,
With deep intent,
I broke them with faith.