Your Daughters' Tears

Nothing breaks your heart more than hearing the cries of your daughter. Then you feel her diaphragm ascend to force out every ounce that occupies her lungs, it escapes the dryness of her mouth, and fills the room with her pain. The sound of her screams cancel out the sound of you telling her that, “...everything will be o.k. baby”. You feel the love, the laughter, the innocence evaporate from her small frame, and her limp body collapses into your arms. Suddenly she becomes a vacuum. She sucks the pain back into her lungs. Trauma is absorbed where innocence evaporated. Her diaphragm descends and her limp body tenses up and rises. She’s filled with anger now. She pushes and pulls away from you and you can hear her mind echo over and over again... that she hates. The love was taken and now hate resides. She steps into the stages of grief and her mother can’t save her. She’s lost someone very close to her heart. Someone on your level. Someone she grew up believing she would never live without. There’s nothing you can say to comfort her. With every kiss...with every tight embrace...she rejects it all. Pardon my French but, she doesn’t want to hear that shit. She doesn’t want to hear that they are in a better place. She doesn’t want to hear that they aren’t in pain anymore. She doesn’t want to hear that it will be o.k. She doesn’t want to hear that they are in a place called heaven. She wants them back. And you can’t offer that to her. All you can do...is pray that the hate escapes and the love returns. When she cries out, “Why?”...you know that your answers won’t suffice, so you free her. You loosen your grip and wait for her return. She returns...and you try every day to help heal the tear in her heart. But she’ll never be the same. And neither will you. You live the remainder of your life trying to protect her from that same experience. And you realize you have another daughter you must console. She shuts herself down and she can’t comprehend or express her pain. She doesn’t exhale. She swallows the grief and allows it to slowly rot. You spend the day trying to help her regurgitate that pain. Little by little she does...and her tears begin to flow. You catch them. And you know that you will have to repeat this process over and over. Now your heart is wounded. This wasn’t easy. This was one of the hardest moments of your life as a parent. Nothing comes easy when you tell your daughter that her greatest love has transitioned. And only time can heal you all.