Sudden Infant Death Syndrome

There are no words for what has happened to you. There is no sentence that could fill this space. You put your child to bed — breathing, warm, a small human being who had just begun to live. And when you came back, everything was different. Forever different. No sound. No reason. No explanation.

What you are carrying right now is not a symptom in the ordinary sense. It is a rupture in life. A crack that does not heal the way other wounds heal. Your body knows it before your mind does: your legs no longer carry you. The air gets stuck in your chest. Sleep does not come, or comes too much. Time becomes strange — minutes stretch into hours, days disappear. Sometimes you forget for a moment what has happened, and then it hits again, as if for the first time.