The Roomie

2.7.14

     Not long after I got done playing paparazzi with the accommodations, another girl came into the room. She was petite, with light brown hair and dark eyes, and she came with several bags hanging on her shoulder and one large box held out in front of her.
     "Hi!" she breathed, as she set down the heavy box on the footstool at the end of a bed. "I'm Elyse." As she settled in and started to make her bed (the sheets had been folded at the foot of each bed, and of course I hadn't even started on making my bed), we chatted about where we were from and what we do for work.
     "...So... Do you want to talk about your loss? Or do you want to wait until later? I mean, I guess its kind of inevitable that we'll talk about it eventually this weekend," I kind of stumbled along until I got the words out. It was my awkward attempt to bring up the conversation that was the whole point of the weekend.
     "Oh sure! I don't mind talking about it right now," was her response. "We lost Emma Kate in September... September 26th." She started to slow down and eventually paused on her bed-making, letting the sound of what she just said echo in the room for a minute. "She had Turner's syndrome, so we knew we were going to lose her, but we just didn't know when." She finally stopped and sat down on her bed.
      She told me the story of Emma Kate and how they found out she had the syndrome, and that eventually they found a heart defect and knew that she wasn't going to be with them very long at all. She had given birth 8 days after we had Kaitlyn, and had even been in a hospital not far from where we were, and yet we never knew about each other.
      "The memory box they gave me was awful. It had all this stuff in it that I would never have used anyways, but it also had this little clay thing that you were suppose to do the footprints on but we didn't get the box until we were leaving. Like, what am I suppose to do with that now?" she said. "I ended up taking it back the next week."
       I had to giggle at little bit at her because I think this is just one of those stories you can't understand until you've been exactly where we have been. I'm sure that every one of those memory boxes that is in ever hospital around the country was put together by well-meaning ladies who just want to comfort the women who have just lost their babies, but unless you've been in that moment, it's really hard to know what would be appropriate. I had so many books given to me, and half of them I still haven't even opened with the exception of reading whatever was written in the front of them. And I can't imagine what the nurse thought when this Mom comes bringing a memory box back  to the hospital. I'm sure she was mortified, but Elyse really had the best intentions because she thought that maybe somebody else would appreciate it more than she did. I would have just thrown it away if that had happened to me.
     Eventually, our other two roommates showed up. One was Whitney, who is an Army wife, and the other was Sara, who is a photographer. Both of them were "veteran" Hope Moms- meaning that their losses happened about 4 years ago. They each shared with us their stories of loss, but also their stories of healing and God's faithfulness in giving them future babies.
    After a little while, we all headed down to dinner at the main room that we would be in for the remainder of the weekend.