I’m about to say something that I always give people the choice not to know. Five years ago, I sent many friends a piece of e-mail that said something like, “The baby is gone, and my mother is dead. If you want to know more, you can ask me. If you don’t, I understand.” All of that is still true. Stop reading whenever you’ve read enough.
Five years ago today, I terminated a pregnancy. A week earlier , I’d learned that the fetus I was carrying would develop into a baby who had spina bifida. For me and my family, this was the choice that made the most sense. Knowing this didn’t stop me from crying until I threw up for the next week.
The type of abortion I had is a two-day process; on the first day, the doctors got my body ready for what happened later. That day, my friend Sarah drove me to the clinic, hung out in the waiting-room with me, waited for me, and brought me home. This was before Sarah got her G.P.S., so we got lost, which was very funny. We talked about all kinds of things in the waiting-room, but I don’t remember all of them. Maybe five other people had offered to drive me to the clinic, I’m glad she was the one who did.
The next day, Jamie and I went together to the clinic for the part of the procedure most people think of as, “the abortion”. My doctor called the clinic and told them she wanted me totally unconscious (apparently, they give you the option not to be) , so I was knocked clean out: I don’t remember hearing, or seeing the machines.
Jamie came in afterwards and sat with me until they wheeled me into another room where women wait until the staff lets us go home. In that room, they passed out hard candies, which the told us to eat ( maybe we all needed a bolt of sugar to get us as far as the parking lot). They told us to eat something “with lots of bread in it,” soon. On the way home, I had Jamie get me an onion bagel with cream cheese. I’d been craving onion bagels for months, and I ate them all that Summer.
One week later, another Friday, another morning, my mother died. She’d had Non-Hodgkins (Sp?) Lymphoma which the doctor had sworn was very treatable. We’d all grown used to this and knew would be fine. Turns out Mama had the rare, treatment-resistant kind. Two weeks earlier, Mama had told me that she really was dying.
Only one friend who received my e-mail never did ask for the details. A month later, he e-mailed expressing his sympathy, but didn’t want the details. His wife had been pregnant with their daughter when I wrote to him, so he wasn’t ready to know more. When my friend, Jody called he said, “you must be devastated”. I told him that “devastated” covered how I felt as well as a pocket hankie covered a football field.
Jody and I had coffee together about every month for awhile. He offered a shoulder to cry on (and I did, literally), and we talked about lots of things, some uproariously funny, some not . Sarah kept me from digging myself into a hole by talking me out for “walk-and-talks” while we ran errands While we were combing the racks for a handbag for her, she told me I’d really had the life of Job. And then she told me who Job was because I didn’t know about his biblical suffering
This was the Summer when we ate BBQ chicken with Trish and Jim and David and Marielle (and all the boys) on Friday nights. Six parents and five boys, I loved those Friday nights. If we weren’t there, we were crash-landing at Joe and Rachana house. Loved those nights too, and I miss the good parts. These are the things our friends did for us that horrible Summer; had some small great times with us
