It Takes More Than Time: A Father Remembers a Child Lost by David J. Leonard

It Takes More Than Time: A Father Remembers a Child Lostby David J. Leonard | @DrDavidJLeonard | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Ten years ago, we lost our child.  We shared less than 1 day together in this world yet she has never left my side.
Over the years, people have continually told me, ‘it takes time,’ or ‘you will heal in time.’  Sadly, this is not my experience.  My wounds mark me like a tattoo; the scars have yet to callous with each moment potentially producing anguish that paralyzes all but my tears.  In so many ways, I have been broken for ten years.  
Ten years after saying goodbye, watching Sophie gasp her last breath, her grasping fingers are no less illusive.  Her piercing cries of pain rather than greeting are no less haunting.  
Ten years later, a helicopter, what I thought would be our angel of mercy, still triggers anxiety, transporting me back to the moment I arrived at the hospital, her birth, the Code Blue, the transport, the tubes, the “We have done all we can do” and “she’s really sick,” the quiet of a hospital at 3 AM, the rocking chair, and her last breath.  
I can still see my Mom’s sinking head as she arrived at the airport.  Without words, she knew that Sophie had died as she rushed to be with us. Rather than hold her granddaughter, she was left holding us up while the world came crashing down upon us.  
I can still feel the wet pile of Kleenex that littered the backseat - tissues Anna had used while traveling seventy long miles to Spokane children’s hospital.  While she lay in a hospital, and I sat by Sophie’s bedside, we were bound by our tears.
Ten years has not rendered these memories any less vivid, debilitating, and painful.  Moving forward in life has yet to dull the pain.  Almost weekly, any number of medical shows triggers me.  The fictitious births, fake doctors, made-up code alerts, and unreal babies dying are no less real to me.
Yet, time has forced me to learn to cope with this anguish; I have learned to go back to sleep when startled out of bed by the vision of her closed eyes.  The nightmare is an interruption not an unnavigable rupture. So maybe it does take time but the time is learning how or becoming comfortable with the pain; to live alongside of the nightmare.  Time, or more appropriately work, has provided me with the tools in the lifelong challenging of battling these demons.
For so long, I believed healing was about perspective; that my pathway to “being OK” or “becoming myself again” would be an intellectual process.  Healing would be about learning and turning this crisis into an opportunity to learn, teach, and engage in work that addresses this all-too common tragedy. 
Over these ten years, I learned about infant mortality throughout the world, challenging myself to think about privilege and inequality amid our loss.  I researched the effects of While perspective is important, it is also privilege.  While necessary to reflect on my own privileges, to think about our loss within a broader world, to use our personal tragedy as a moment of transformation, education, and expansion, perspective has not dulled the pain.  No amount of intellectual exploration and theorizing has quelled my tears; it has not muted the screams or dulled the pain. It has helped me learn to live with the pain, tears, and nightmares, to force me to sit with the discomfort, and to use the sadness beyond myself.
I was reminded of the distance traveled over ten years and my stationary place just this week.    
“Do you think you would have had three kids,” Sammy, our 9 year-old who was born 1 year and 4 days after his sister, asked.
Knowing where he was going with his question, having feared it for ten years, I hesitated in my response.
“I don’t know, Sammy.  Probably not.  Why?
“I feel bad,” he said quickly. “I feel bad for Sophie because I replaced her.”
Feeling my heart sink, I hugged him: “I don’t know what would have happened if Sophie didn’t die but I know that you are here.  We love you and are grateful for every moment with you.”
We are never able to outrun the past; we are never able to transcend the pain.  But we are able to live with the nightmares and the fears, to find joy and happiness even as we sit with anguish.  
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David J. Leonard is Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. Leonard's latest books include After Artest: The NBA and the Assault on Blackness (SUNY Press), African Americans on Television: Race-ing for Ratings (Praeger Press) co-edited with Lisa Guerrero and Beyond Hate: White Power and Popular Culture with C. Richard King. He is currently working on a book Presumed Innocence: White Mass Shooters in the Era of Trayvon about gun violence in America. You can follow him on Twitter at @drdavidjleonard.