HEARTACHE

I am not an emotional person. I don't cry easily, if at all. I can count on my hands the number of times my husband has seen me cry in the last 16 years together. I never even shed a tear at my daughter's funeral.

In the rare instance I am overcome with emotion, it's never in public. I have a physical inability to cry in front of people, especially strangers.

That's why yesterday took me by surprise.

We were in church. It was a particularly uplifting service where the music was more "contemporary" and some of the songs that I love. We had a group of people there who were in a program for young adults who are troubled. Most of them are in their early 20s. At one point a young lady got up and told her story. She said that she had gotten into drugs, and had even abused hard drugs while pregnant. Her baby had aspirated meconium during during his premature birth, and she was told he wouldn't survive. For some reason this hit me like a ton of bricks. Maybe it's because I didn't expect it. Maybe it's because I was really "in the moment" with all the singing and stuff. I don't know. All I know is that I now know what people mean when they say choke back tears. This lady's story went on for a few minutes, and I turned into a robot. If someone would have said one word to me I would have lost it. I sat there with my back pressed up against the pew, fighting to swallow. Fighting to breath.

Even now, three years later, when I think that everything is fine and I have moved on, something comes out of left field and shakes me to the core.

Nothing is ever the same after you lose a baby.