The time had flown by, her hope and her excitement growing higher and higher. As her due date neared, she had kept a bag packed by the door. The nursery stood at readiness, fully supplied and thoroughly stocked, everything soft and new. She herself felt on the edge of something big, something real finally happening in her life. She was going to be a mother.

The night she woke up with a sharp labor pain, Eric had been calm and ready, getting her out of the house and to the hospital in record time, helping her time the contractions with the same level-headed, clinical approach he had to everything. Saying all the right and soothing things, being the same reliable presence he had always been all through the labor and delivery, which had physically been simultaneously worse and not as bad as Tina had been expecting.

It was finally over, the baby born, and she had collapsed back in the hospital bed, suffused with something that could only be joy. Relief and hope pushed away the lingering pain and exhaustion of what she’d just physically gone through. Eric had looked at her with tears in his eyes and a soft, loving expression she’d only seen etched across his handsome face rarely. He had lifted her hand and kissed it and Tina had nodded in acknowledgment, tears brimming over as she smiled at him.

Then there had been confusion at the foot of her bed, the doctor’s and nurses’ backs to her and suddenly the atmosphere changed, became charged some how, and she could hear their voices, low and intent, trading instructions. Why weren’t they giving her the baby? Tina had wondered, before she gradually began to realize that something was very, very wrong.

In the present, Tina closed her eyes against this reminiscence and was surprised to find that she still had tears left to cry as they wet her face.

Stillborn. How? Why? What had she done wrong? Why hadn’t they known? Would a Cesarean have made a difference? The doctor had said no. But she had felt her baby, she would have known if it wasn’t alive. She would have known instantly, even though the doctor promised her that it was no one’s fault, she had still raged and threatened him until Eric’s voice had sliced though her pain and told her that these things just happened, sometimes. And the doctor had echoed that sentiment. These things happened.

Tina rolled into sitting position and wiped at her eyes with the backs of her hands. She took a deep breath and waited for the tears to subside. Finally she stood up and walked to the window and peered out.

It was a sunny day. There was a woman walking her dog down the street, cars passing by. Life was going on out there. But life had stopped for her in the white silence of that hospital room. And she couldn’t make the connect anymore between what was out there, the rest of the world, and herself any more. That should have frightened her, but it didn’t. There was a certain solace in it.

She didn’t know if she could be connected to the world again, or even if she wanted to. All she knew was this pain. And on some level she was unwilling to let this grief go. Because then, there would be nothing left.