Learning Lament

                            

Once upon a time, I had to hand a dead baby boy wrapped in a swaddling cloth of undecorated hospital blanket back to his mother. 

He was about 6 months old. His family was newly in the country with the bare bones to live with in a tiny apartment. He stopped breathing because of a very unfortunate accident in the night. His parents didn't speak English nor did they have any friends they could call to translate at 1am. Their dialect was not available via the translation phone. We worked so hard to bring him back. To dignify his little life. But we all knew.

When we were done I handed his little body, wrapped up with just his sweet bruised face showing, to his mother and she wailed. Nothing can describe that sound, nor can anything describe the experience of that moment of absolute knowledge that the soul has left the body and that even if the body is kept here for a little longer by our efforts, that precious loved and living soul is no longer in habitation here. Some of us know it well. 

When his mother left she asked, via the impersonal phone translator we finally found, just one thing: Please don't leave him alone. We took shifts out of our crazy busy night shift in that Emergency Department to hold that little cold baby until he went to the morgue.

Once upon another time, I said to a strong man in his 40s, "It's going to be ok, I am just going to give you something to help you relax so we can fix that blockage in your heart". He smiled at me and said thank you. Within 30 mins, my coworkers and I were fighting with Death and experienced that young man's moment. Just like that. It arrived and stole everything. I went with the physician to tell his family. They wailed too.

I have lost count of how many precious, unique, loved and needed souls I have witnessed depart. Some I have fought for, some just needed comfort against the inevitable.

Their stories are things I don't often emotionally talk about. Sure, I make mention of them in passing maybe, to a coworker that may have been involved or generically to people when they ask questions about "how many?" or "what was the worst?". 

This time of isolation and stillness in the literal Valley of the Shadow of Death named COVID-19 has let all the shadows of grief walk free for me. All their stories are coming to mind and it is crushing me. 

Here is where I am finally able to understand the importance of lament. The Wailing of the Soul. We are not built to bear grief and suffering alone and in isolation. We are not supposed to keep it in the cabinet of the mind, locked away from the heart. We are meant to recognize Death as the Thief and Devourer that it is. It is NOT a 'normal part of life'. It is the ultimate violation, corroding and disintegrating beauty and life. People who say that there is some bittersweet beauty in death have maybe not felt the endless pit of emptiness that comes with a miscarriage. There is no beauty there. 

Is there hope? Is there beauty when spring comes again, fertilized by the fallen leaves of autumn? Yes, but that does not make loss beautiful. We lose the value of the fallen to move past it so quickly and without honoring the importance of the life lost by acknowledging the immense pain of its absence.

This is why our wailing is important. It is why I have to choose to truly honor each individual that I have loved and lost in this life by allowing myself to FEEL my grief for them. This includes every 'patient', because honestly when I have walked through those final moments with other human beings: He was MY tiny baby boy that I lost in that Emergency Department. He was MY 40 year old brother that I put to sleep and never awakened on that Cath Lab table.

So yes, Friends, I am falling apart in this Valley of the Shadow of Death. All I ask is that you hold my grief with me. That when you interact with people you don't know and people that you do know, with people that irritate you and with people in whom your heart finds rest, with people whose choices you don't understand and with people that agree with you and admire you: that you CHOOSE to honor their humanity.

This is Good Friday. And yes, I DO BELIEVE that Sunday is coming! That is where all my hope is found. But not yet, I have to wail here a while.