A Song for My Sister

Before you read on, please be aware that this is a very graphic account of my memory of my sister's stillbirth. If you are sensitive to this topic, you may not want to read this.

This story lives in my memories and thoughts, haunting me. I pulled this excerpt from my journal, written nineteen years later, almost to the day.

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It was December 17, 2001. I don’t remember anything else about the day, not the sky, the weather, or what I wore. The memories are fragments, but not the kind of fragments where you can pick up the pieces with your hands, but powdered glass that pierces your feet a week later, after you thought that you vacuumed or swept well enough to risk bare feet on the cold floor. Crystalline mine fields in my brain leaving scars so small they can’t be seen on the outside, but inside I am in turmoil. My own sister, dead as she was born, strangled by the very cord which sustained her life. Oddly poetic, in the most gruesome way. I paid my penance already for thinking thus, with the loss of my own Nicholas Blake. My son will get his own story later, if he was a son. I feel in my heart that he was, and I love him something fierce, and I know he is having a ball in that dear old cottage in the afterlife with his beloved grandmother and well missed Auntie Lizzie.

I digress. On this nondescript day, I remember much excitement and hushed whispers “the baby is coming! She’s coming!” The midwife came, and Mom was prepared for a shower to ease her labor, as I know now. I stood at the corner of the bathroom, by the stone statue of a mermaid that Mom always kept. I watched Mom, curious, and there I saw her! The first glimpse of my sweet sister. A tiny baby foot descended from between my mother’s legs, and I was so excited. I squealed out happily “I see a foot! I see her foot!” Behind me, the room stands still. Mom stands still. “That’s not good,” murmurs the midwife, the tension rolling off of her and for the first time that day, I feel fear. Mom is rushed to the foot of the bed, where blankets have been set up as a birthing station. All white, the room is all white. Mom screams. Action is taken and the screaming makes me cry. And then I hear it. The worst sound I have ever heard in my life. If you have never heard an umbilical cord rip, you never want to. That sound haunts my dream, haunts my waking moments. Suddenly, the white walls are red, so red, the blood belonging to my mom. My grandmother, the witch, pulls me into the bathroom away from the action, away from my mommy. Someone calls for an ambulance, Mom is bleeding out. She’s 40, too old for this, too old to give birth naturally on the dirty carpet of our home, but it worked with me 6 years prior and she thought she could try again, the day after her 41st birthday. I saw my mother’s blood on the wall. The ambulance comes, The Witch did her due diligence and hid me from the carnage, this home birth gone terribly wrong, this tragedy. Why did she choose to give birth at home? Why did she hate doctors? Mama you would still be alive if you went to the damn Doctor. But she didn’t, and here I am at work hiding behind this mask and crying into the warm cotton, hoping that my typing looks like work but I can’t work, I am too broken from remembering. Maybe I’m not better, but I also can’t recall the sound as loudly as I did before. Why can’t the fixing stay fixed? I just want to be better, to be less in pain.

Back to the story. The memory shifts after Mom leaves in the ambulance. I blink and I’m holding her hand in a small hospital room. It’s dark, so dark, and Pastor Mark came in. I loved Pastor Mark. As a child when I imagined God he had Mark’s face, with his white teeth and sandy hair, his young, bearded, handsome face smiling down on us in Heaven. He prays over Mom and tears stream down her beautiful face, that sweet gorgeous face. I lost two people that day. Mom and my sister. Mom always loved me, always doted on me, spoiled me, and showered me with love and attention. But she stopped loving herself that day, stopped all doctor visits, stopped wearing makeup, dressing nicely. She was so fiercely protective of me, my sweet mama, but lived with an untreated hernia for 15 years, wore old, baggy clothes, and constantly dieted. I wish you could see yourself through everyone else’s eyes, Mama. A rockstar, a stunner, my hero. You did everything you could, Mama. I love you.

It’s surreal seeing these bits of my story come out on these pages. Like I’m writing about someone else, like I’m a fucked up human for making up these stories, even though all of this comes from my memory. Not all roads are nicely paved, it seems. But mom and dad gave me some damn great shoes for walking this path.

I forgot to tell you her name. Elizabeth Devin Macht, we will never forget you.