Gigabytes of Heartbeats
- Jul 30, 2015
- 7 min read
Updated: Feb 17, 2022
Life is complicated right now. Complicated enough where I don’t even know where to go next; I don't know how to write here. I got to the Cassette Tape part of my journal, posted that blog, and then the next parts of my journal... I haven’t blogged our story since then. I tried going on from there, and you guys, I had to quit. I couldn’t read that again. No no no no. I’m already having a hard time feeling Super this week (and last week, obviously), so I don’t want to think about old hard things right now. Let’s just thought-block and move on, until my brain gets so used to blocking those days out that it does it automatically. I can train myself to only think about the good parts, right?!? This is how I used to live, the way I thought God wanted life to go: just think about the positive and block out the rest. And it worked... until it didn’t. But there’s no redemption without diving into the depths of the worst pain you’ve felt and refusing to shove it under the rug ever again, no matter what. So?
********
Grief is such a monstrously complicated beast. There’s no way to explain how it takes over your brain and puts a dark depressive filter on everyday life. In the beginning, you just stumble through, cause there isn’t another way you've heard about. You just DO LIFE, and that’s all. But when I got pregnant around two months after Oliver’s death, I moved out of the Doing-Life stage, into the Crazy-Unhinged, stage. I hadn’t even processed his death yet, and had no idea what I was doing with a new life in his old tomb. Then, when I discovered my marriage was based on betrayal and lies too, I knew nothing else but to go emotionally extinct. I couldn’t handle it all at once. I cycled between grief and numbness, passionate anger and weak acceptance, and the horrible fact of needing something I had no idea how to ask for. I had enough self-pity to fill all of our Minnesota’s lakes, which was a battle in itself to overcome. But also, I had just enough desire to save my family too, even with no direction as to how. So I focused on the only thing I could feel passionate about, and thought-blocked the rest for now. My thing?
Heartbeats.
My entire life was bent on hearing the heartbeat of this new baby at ultrasound appointments. At seven weeks pregnant they could find it already - oh the tears I’d cry, so hard, seeing that minuscule organ flap around on the ultrasound screen. But then they’d send me home and the happy was over, for what felt like forever. No cause was ever found for Oliver’s death (original story here), so there was nothing they knew how to prevent. There were constant tests, tests, and more tests. All good. Measurements, more ultrasounds - all fine. So the horrible mystery of his death fed my anxious Googling habit to the degree of you don’t even want to know how bad. Of course, there’s eighteen million articles about everything you can do wrong in pregnancy. And then, there’s eighteen million other articles that tell you those articles are wrong and the opposite is true. So that’s where my lunacy existed. Every night I went to sleep reading them, praying and begging God I’d happen upon the one thing that would keep this baby’s heartbeat going. The heartbeat. The heartbeat. I had to hear it again.
Every time I’d lose my temper with Max and Josh, I’d wonder if the heartbeat was gone (Stillbirth *can be* caused by stress. And... being too hot. And being too cold. And not moving enough. And moving too much. And not exercising. And exercising...) When I got the stomach flu once, when I had migraines all the time - every time my body felt odd in the least way, I wondered: is it over now? Is the heartbeat gone? Was last time the last time? When I couldn’t take it anymore, I’d call my nurse and tell her how I was going crazy. After a couple of those calls, she told me to just come into the clinic whenever I wanted to hear the heartbeat, so I did. One time, they couldn’t find it for six minutes straight and... well, it was a bad day for me, for them. I starting feeling awful for the dark cloud of despair I was spreading.
So I rented our own heart monitor - the kind you goop up and hold to your stomach. Daily, sometimes hourly, I’d use it - it had become my drug. I’d go through a bottle of the goop weekly. Sometimes in the middle of a stressful life-thing, I’d pause, literally, what I was doing to find the heartbeat and listen to it for a second before I could go on. But even when there was no imminent stress-maker, I’d sit there with the wand held against my stomach for ten minutes at a time, just because. In the times when it took too long for me to find it, my husband would take over; gently moving it this way and angling it that way, while I cried and plugged my ears to block out the silence. Once he’d finally find it, he’d tap me or look at me “right”, and I’d know I could unplug them again. We're pretty much professional heartbeat finders now. And as dark as it sounds, when my husband would look for the heartbeat for me, it was one of the only times my heart would soften towards him and the lies in our marriage. This was our life, for months and months - the only "dates" we'd have revolved around that sound.
Somewhere in the middle of all this I started recording the heartbeat with video on my phone; I was always afraid it would be the last time and I couldn’t skip any of them. I took for granted the beauty of prenatal appointments, so humdrum they were after three healthy pregnancies. I never imagined anything would go wrong. When they discovered Oliver’s heart was no more... oh man... that heartbeat sound; that’s the only thing that I knew about him. His personality was his heartbeat. No hair color, no expressions, no preferences of food and toys... just a heartbeat. That was it. So this time around I was going to save that - I’d have to upload all the videos I took of the heartbeat often, to make room in my phone’s memory for the next group. Eventually, I had gigabytes of heartbeats stored on my computer.
Around this time, while trying to Google my hopes higher, I stumbled across an article about what makes a heart beat for the very first time. Anywhere around sixteen days after conception it starts to thump, they said, but their description of why, was lacking: “...exactly what causes the heart to begin contracting is essentially a cell biological question. Unfortunately, there is not yet a definite answer to this question...” (read in my snarkiest tone of voice.) Ugh. Well geez, thanks for the worst answer for NO ANSWER, ever. But here’s the thing: I’ve watched TV - a heart that’s stopped? It needs electric current zapped into it. We all know that - it just needs a spark. A SPARK. How does a barely recognizable heart that is just a glob of cells and doesn’t even have valves or whatever yet, get sparked at only sixteen days into life? What sparks it? “...there’s no answer yet...” Oh stop. Something happens. Something.
So I placed my fingers over the side of my neck to feel my pulse. And was just weird and sat there and thought about it as the thumps passed beneath my fingertips. If the big-bang invented hearts and beating and their insistence on going on and on and on... it seems odd, at best. But gosh, when I thought about it in light of more than that?
God jump-started my heart.
When I got down to the literal crazy awesome thing that almost every second, the beat that God ignited, that time He touched me straight-up 34 years ago - that touch is echoing, still. Two years after this whole heartbeat-searching mess, I still love placing my head on my husband's chest and listening, or my kids chests when they're sleeping. I feel downright Crazy-Person about how much I love it. I want to take care of them even better when I think about God revving it up for the the very first time. It's so hard to feel God's real presence and existence sometimes from day to day, but a heartbeat is a direct God-thing, HE DID THAT. He started that thing up, personally. I've grown so Christian-spoiled to the whole wonder of God that the beating of my heart was just a Normal Boring Thing. Ugh.
As ridiculous as it sounds, in dark moments now I find hundreds of comforts in just holding my hand over my heart. It's weird, fine, you're right. But God did that. I don't understand a lot, and I hate that life can't just be easier, but GOSH, every heart that has ever beat, ever, was on purpose. I have to just sit and let it sink in sometimes. Something He started personally, individually. He didn't have a mass start-up and just throw it out there. He starts each one... one, at, a time. I usually thought-block the fact that God started Oliver's heart, and then didn't intervene when it ceased (I don't believe God stopped it's beating. That wasn't His plan...) because that's too hard for me. I don't get it. But when I force myself to just go there, admit I'm angry about that, there's a beautiful thought to the idea that God started Oliver's heart on purpose too. God knows my obsession with heartbeats, because He's obsessed with them too. I believe, to Him, they're the most beautiful thing in all of His creation.
Comments