The pain is unbearable.
I’ve always wondered how emotional pain could manifest itself into physical pain – but it does. Think about it. Why would something such as a breakup or finding out your spouse cheated on you actually cause you physical pain? No one punched you in the stomach, but it feels like it. No one grabbed a butcher knife and stabbed you in the chest with it – but if you close your eyes, you can literally see through your mind’s eye the handle of the knife protruding from you like some bizarre diving board that’s supporting a tiny person who is about to spring from it into the pool of warm blood puddling on your stomach.
Here’s the problem with emotional pain: It doesn’t stop. A punch in the gut only lasts for a few minutes – unless the brute who punched you knocked the wind out of you, then it lasts a good deal longer. And even a knife, if it misses your heart, can be removed and the wound sewn. Sure, you’ll probably be on hydrocodone for a week or so, and that can be a pleasant little buzz when chased down with a shot of bourbon. But eventually, the pain will go away – even after the narcotics are gone.
But emotional pain? Well, that’s a different story. Emotional pain is more like suffering than it is actual pain. It’s an ache that wakes you up in the morning and puts you to sleep at night. You try to go about your day and do things that will keep your mind off of it, but it’s always there, lurking in a dark corner behind your heart. You feel its weight with every breath you take. No matter what your mind is distracted with, the weight is there – ready to spring to life as unbearable agony the minute you allow yourself to think about it.
The pain my wife and I felt after losing our baby girl was that kind of torment. Yes, as loving parents, we took it hard. Really hard. But no one took it harder than our 5-year-old daughter, Isabel.
Unfortunately, she had every reason to.
Now, I’ve heard of sickly babies who are born but aren’t given much of a chance. Maybe their mother smoked or did drugs – who knows. But the baby hangs on for a few days as it’s attached to enough electronic equipment to make it look like less of a baby as it does a tiny, wrinkled little Frankenstein’s monster.
But that wasn’t the case with our baby girl, Annie. Her Apgar was perfect and she gained weight and thrived for her first three months of life way beyond the expectation of the median line of the growth chart the pediatrician liked to show us. She was even laughing and smiling as if the world owed her nothing but joy.
And we taught Isabel how to hold baby Annie properly. She was always so proud of herself when we let her be a big girl and hold her baby sister. The two of them bonded instantly. We took enough pictures of those two looking into each other’s eyes to fill a dozen scrapbooks. But those pictures may never get into those books because, after Annie died, we can no longer bear to look at them.
It was toward the end of Annie’s third month of life that the “incident” occurred. My wife and I were downstairs watching some rom-com that my wife had seen a thousand times but I somehow still found bearable. We heard the baby cry, but only for a moment. Annie wasn’t old enough to start Ferberizing her, so my wife and I were always at the ready to go get her. But Annie stopped crying shortly after she began and, well, we were comfortable and neither of us felt like climbing that long flight of stairs to the baby’s room. So we both came to the more convenient assumption that the baby had fallen back to sleep.
It wasn’t until Isabel released a bone-chilling wail 15 minutes later that we realized something was terribly wrong. I don’t remember springing from the couch or flying up the stairs, but I do remember the sight as I flung wide the partially open door.
There was Isabel, lovingly cradling a very dead Annie.
My memory from that point is sketchy, at best. I remember my wife performing CPR while I searched for my phone. I remember driving like a bat on fire to the hospital and looking over as my wife somehow continued performing CPR while crying uncontrollably. I remember the moment in the hospital when the emergency room doctor came out to tell us the worst news any parent could possibly hear.
And I remember, shortly after, when my wife and I simultaneously realized we had left Isabel home and alone.