When I start to come to, I see a nurse standing over me. At first I can't even speak and the few words that I try to utter are indecipherable. After several tries, I'm finally able to get it out. "My son?" I ask. "Where is my son?"

The nurse looks away and quietly says, "We have to get you stabilized and then a doctor will come in and talk to you."

There is this silence that seems to stretch forever as I lie there thinking about what those words might mean. "He must have downs syndrome," I tell myself. "There must be some sort of issue like that." One time, a few years back, one of our cats caught a blue jay and brought it to me. The bird was still alive and I tried to get the cat to drop it, but he held on to his prize as though his teeth were stuck to it and no amount of yelling or pleading from me could make him let go. I thought about that cat's tenacity as I let my mind grasp that tiny possibility of hope, as I drift in and out of consciousness.

When I wake up Jason is standing in front of me. He looks strange. His eyes meet mine and there are these words coming from his mouth, but they seem to be coming from a distance a lot farther away, almost like they are coming from the hallway beyond the room.

"He didn't make it."

I spend several minutes trying to figure out what that means and he must see that the words are not reaching me because he tries again. "He died."

Those words echo inside my head. "He died, he died, died, died died."

I just want to be invisible. I want to climb back into the safety of sleep.

Some days pass and before I leave the hospital, several nurses tell me that my milk will be coming in and I 'll need to think about doing something to stop it. One nurse suggests a pill that I can take that will dry it up, but after checking with someone else in the hospital, determines that my doctor will not prescribe that medication. Instead my doctor stops by my hospital room and talks about what will happen.

"Really the only thing we can do about that is to have you bind your breasts," she tells me. That way the milk will dry up quickly."

When I first hold that bandage in my hands, images of centuries of women being bound in various ways come to my mind. I am expected to follow instructions and I do. I go home wearing an ace bandage tightly wrapped around my chest. In the days that follow, I wake up each morning lying in a puddle of milk with breasts that feel heavy and painful. Sometimes I express milk to calm that angry pain even though I've been warned by several well meaning people that it will just increase my supply. Despite my effort, wearing that bandage does not seem to be working because I am still dealing with painful boobs and flooding milk so I soon give up trying to stop it, choosing instead to allow it to run its course. It takes weeks, but it is my last physical connection to my son and I am heavyhearted when my body finally stops producing milk. Many months later, I come across the ace bandage while I am cleaning and I am happier after I place it in the trash.

I recall that the cemetery smelled of juniper and baked dirt. The heat rose up from our ankles as we stood underneath the ancient trees. There were rows of people; our friends and family who sat in folding chairs in front of his tiny pine casket whose inside was lined with soft, white silk. We'd given his little, pale blue, footed giraffe suit to the funeral home and I had to trust that it was on him and that the handful of soft toys that Sierra had chosen to be placed inside the casket was next to him. It was a closed casket.

I can only remember snippets and pieces from that day. I remember that when we arrived at the cemetery we were greeted by a guy named Steve who worked for the mortuary. The open ground was covered with fake grass and there was a support beam holding up his casket. There were several floral arrangements on top, so many that I could not see the carving of the little animals on top and I pushed one aside a bit so I could run my fingers over the dips and curves on the wood one more time. After a little while although at the time I had no sense of time, so it could have been twenty minutes or several hours, people began to arrive. I remember Jason stepping towards the casket and turning around to face our family and friends. I guess I could use words like officiate or conduct, but what he really did was stand there and talk about what had just happened and then he tried to map out a plan for how we would survive what had just happened. I said a few words too, but I was shaky and held on to his arm to steady myself. And then, just like that, it was over and everyone stood up and prepared to leave. And we were expected to leave as well.

I remember standing there wishing that I could stay there with my son. Knowing that it wouldn't matter because he was not there, but finding those steps to be the hardest I have ever taken. Walking away seemed impossible.
"I guess we should go now."
"Just a little longer."
We stood there next to the piled up dirt and watched the warm sun dry out the lazy susans. It was hard to stand there and harder still to walk away.