Darkness

The days that followed losing the girls were long, but the nights haunted me and seemed never ending.  I was in ICU, so there were no visitors allowed after visiting hours and I was left in a large room with all of these tubes coming out of me everywhere.  The only sounds were of the IV pump alarm, and the suction of those horrible leg things they make you wear to keep from getting blood clots.  I can remember laying there each night thinking what have I done.  People would come in and out and I would hear them and respond, but the only thing I can remember ever thinking was what have I done.  If I happen to fall asleep, even for one moment, I would quickly awaken to the sounds of babies crying in my head or the phantom kicks I was still feeling in my uterus even though it was empty.  Once I was well enough to move up to the next level of ICU, it was my mission to get out of the hospital.  I was put on the geriatric floor and the screams coming from the very old at night were unsettling, but comforting, because I knew I wasn't the only one losing my mind.  Once I made it home, the real pain hit.  The pain of being at home without kids.  The fear of never having that experience.  The hate for doing what I had done to my children.  I longed to know what they looked like.  Because I was so sick, and Baby A was already gone, we were not able to see them after they were born.  Everyone said it was for the best, but in my mind, it wasn't.  Even the worst image would have been better than nothing.  I could live with myself with at least one glimpse, but nothing?  I was left to stare at ultrasound pictures trying to visualize what they would have looked like.  I have a pretty clear picture of Baby A and can make out her face so well.  And a great profile of Baby B that is just stunning.  They were little babies.  I would scour the internet looking for any picture of a baby born at 21 weeks to try to piece together the images in my head.  This brought me to a lot of anti-abortion sites, which made it even harder to live with myself.  Our doctor had sent our babies off to be genetically tested straight from the hospital to try to find out if there was something that was going wrong genetically that was causing me to miscarry.  This bothered me even more as I didn't know what was happening to them or where they would end up.  They would never be given a proper burial.  They would probably just be dumped in the trash.  I hated myself even more.  I couldn't make anyone understand my dilemma.  There is no support group for grieving mothers who don't know what their kids look like.  I would have nightmares about autopsies and I would wake every night to babies crying.  Even to this day, I still wake up and hear them.  Especially, when the kids aren't here.  I finally decided to give them names and hoped that that would help me heal.  I had always known that Baby A would be Audrey Danielle, and we were torn on a name for Baby B, so I just decided that I would name Baby A, Audrey and Baby B, Danielle.  I never spoke of this, but it made them more real to me.  Everyone around had moved on, like it was a bad dream.  It was something that I could not forget.  Even though it had all happened, I needed something there to solidify that it was real, that they were real.  Every child that had passed before had been but a ball of cells, an empty sac, but these were actual babies.  Not that that made it any easier to deal with, but I had seen these children on ultrasound.  And I was just to pretend that they don't exist.  That they were not still my children.  To just carry on with life.