Lucy Wilde
I lean over the sheep-height split-rail fence, dropping the grain bowls for the rams. Randy, my new landlord, is teaching me about sheep. “The big ones won’t let you touch them,” he says. They stay huddled a few feet away, but one half the size of the rest comes up and touches my face with his nose. It’s the lightest touch, but it sends a flood of warmth right down to my belly.
Randy laughs and says, “That’s Dylan. He is not shy with humans, like the others.” The four rams crowd around the bowl farthest from me, while Dylan has the closest bowl all to himself. He looks up at me, and I hover my hand just above his head. He pushes against it, and I give him a little scratch.
I ask Randy why Dylan is different than the others. “He was a bummer lamb,” he says, gently stroking Dylan’s back. “His mother wouldn’t feed him. So, we brought him to the house to bottle feed him, and he stayed there for three months. I would put him inside my hoodie, holding him against my chest so he could hear my heartbeat. He even slept in our bed,” he chuckles.
“Was the mother sick?” I ask, watching Dylan scamper over to eat with the other rams.
“Nope. The vet checked her over and couldn’t find anything wrong. But her last lamb had died, and the vet told us that we should have left the dead lamb with the ewe until she chose to leave it. If you take it away too soon, they maybe can’t breed again. Or if they do lamb again, they’ll reject it.”
Dylan scurries back to where we are standing, pushed out by the bigger rams. He threads his head through a gap in the rails and rubs his nose against Randy’s knee. “He’s always looking for affection,” he laughs. I climb over the fence, and Dylan leans his pillowy body against my legs. Crouching down to his level, I put my arms around his shoulders. He pushes his head against my chest and lets out a deep sigh.
***
I lie in the nursing home single bed next to the 80 pounds of skin and bones that is my mother, because I think it is what I should do. We both lie side-by-side with arms across our chests. Like two corpses crammed into the same coffin. So close, the oxygen from her mask hisses against my ear. Earlier, I had wrapped her favorite Chanel No.5-infused scarf around my neck. I pull it up over my nose to cover the sourness of the room.
I want to be close to my dying mother but feel as disconnected from her as I have since I came into existence inside her body. Her life force should have nourished mine—her blood was my blood. But her ability to nurture was bled dry from longing for the previous inhabitant of her womb—my sister Elizabeth Anne, who was born fifteen months before me, and died within her first 24 hours of life.
The nurse breezes into the room, halts as if she has walked into a sliding glass door. Her hand goes to her mouth, tears gathering over this faux tableau of ultimate love and grief. Usually, the sight of tears makes me tear up too, the way the breasts of mothers who have lost their babies often leak at the sound of a baby’s cry. But nothing comes. My heart is a lump of lead in my chest.
***
My craniosacral therapist places her left hand over my belly button. Her hand hovers above my body with a sliver of space between our flesh. My belly button moves toward her hand like water against gravity. When we connect there is a swirling deep inside, as if the remnant of my umbilical cord is trying to draw the warmth of her touch deep into an empty space inside my body.
“It’s a miracle that you were conceived at all,” she says, her creamy voice measuring each word. “You are a double miracle, because you weren’t only conceived—you lived.” Although I am silent, she knows me well enough to know I want to hear more. “Grief can affect the ability to conceive. And even if conception happens, the child often doesn’t survive past six months. The medical term is ‘failure to thrive,’” she says, slipping her right hand under my lower back above my tailbone. Her left hand moves just below my belly button. “As if it’s the baby’s fault for not being able to save itself.”
“A therapist once told me that I gestated in a womb of grief.” As I say this, my uterus shudders. A shiver begins in that deep empty space, spreading outwards until I am visibly shaking. Between my chattering teeth, I say, “I feel like I was born with a broken heart.” Turning onto my side I curl my knees up, hug them against my chest. “My mother was the first person to break my heart,” I whisper.
She wraps me in a heated blanket, leans her body against my back. Places one hand over my tailbone, the other cupping the back of my head. Like she is cradling a newborn.
***
I went to stay with my parents for a few weeks when my dad was diagnosed with lung cancer. The first afternoon I was making split pea soup in the kitchen, and through a crack in the door, I could see into their bedroom. My dad was taking an afternoon nap, and I watched my mom pull the bedspread up over his shoulders and drape an extra blanket over his feet.
I felt like I was spying on a stranger. He was always the one who initiated gestures of love—bringing her a hot cup of tea in bed each morning, grasping her yellow rubber-gloved hand while she was doing the dishes, dancing her around the kitchen. Watching her tuck the blanket around his feet, I felt a sharp pain in my chest. I closed my eyes and imagined her coming out and hugging me, like it was the most natural thing, soothing the sharp pain with her warmth and the steady rhythm of her heartbeat.
When she came out of the bedroom, she looked tiny like she had put Dad’s housecoat on by mistake. Perhaps diminished by the loss from the creeping dementia. Maybe losing parts of her life story had also made her body forget why her heart had always been caged and heavy. I always pictured her heart as a lump of lead, like mine.
She wrapped her arms around my waist, leaning her head against my chest. I hugged her with one arm and kept stirring the thick pea soup with the other, so it wouldn’t stick to the pot. Maybe her heart was molten, and it was mine that was still leaden.
***
I sit on the edge of my mom’s bed while the nurse checks her pulse, shifts her onto her side to prevent bed sores. Through the window, I can see the stone building that used to be St. Joseph’s Hospital, where Mom gave birth to six children. I wonder if she ever lay here in bed and had joy in her heart about the six babies she birthed into this world. Or did she only feel the loss of the one they whisked away right after birth? The daughter she never saw again.
Something hits the window with a thud. I jump up and open the window, see a tiny bird body on the stone pathway below. I race out of the room, down the two flights of stairs. It’s an adult Yellow Warbler, small enough to fit in the palm of my hand. I cup my other hand over its body and feel a couple of erratic heartbeats through a rib cage as weightless as balsa wood. Then nothing. It doesn’t flinch as I hold its body against my thumping heart. I imagine hovering my finger above its chest and with the slightest rhythmic movements, bringing it back to life.
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Lucy Wilde is a writer who lives in a cottage in the forest on Salt Spring Island, B.C., Canada. She writes creative nonfiction and fiction, and her writing has appeared in several publications including Pithead Chapel, The Citron Review and Atticus Review. Her hermit crab essay, “Release and Hold Harmless,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and was included in the Best of the Net Anthology 2023. Her essay “Volcanology” was nominated for a Pushcart 2024.