Between Mourning and Night

CW: Mental health, infant death

Between Mourning and Night

The card dropping through the letterbox reeks of pity. Your husband says that if you keep declining invitations, they'll eventually stop coming. Perfect, you think.

“Fake it till you make it,” he'd said right after your son was born, when you’d questioned whether you’d be a good enough mom to this precious gift.

It’s been over two months since the memorial service, and you haven’t once left the house. Just getting out of bed seems pointless. You are so close to giving up, wanting to be laid to rest right next to your baby boy.

Your husband doesn’t have those physical aftershocks. His grief is diffuse and smoky as he tries, but fails to support you, to say the right things. He makes sure you eat and bathe while his pain moves inward because there is no room amongst your own all-consuming angst. Closed curtains and tears are a way of life for you as he navigates the outside world for both of you.

You stare at him while he dresses for work every morning, adjusting his tie just so, his paternity leave ending simultaneously with your baby’s life. You do everything in your power not to resent him because you understand loss takes on different shapes for everyone. The five stages be damned.

For you, heartache is a physical ache that never relents. Milk continues to come, as you instinctively await a cry that never comes. Your hormones crash and burn daily. The owner of a once-taut abdomen, you're left with a spongy, unrecognizable body. Arms so heavy that it's tough to function - yet utterly empty.

All that time you spent preparing for motherhood, the early weeks of pure joy, those emotions have nowhere to land. A phantom let-down that doesn’t relent. Then, there’s your husband, a constant reminder of what could have been.

You need to say your baby’s name over and over. Jack. You yearn for his warmth on your chest; the sounds he made that only you could read like real words. The severing of routines, even after just three months of shared bonding, is impossible to comprehend. You do not want to remember a time when you didn’t have him, and yet you bargain, if only you could go back, get a second chance. You'd give your own life for his.

While your grief is immediate, your husband's is the ache of a lost future. Jack’s first steps, birthday candles, soccer games - a cascade of lost moments that will eventually find their way in through the cracks in your heart -holidays, proms, graduations, grandchildren that will never exist.

When your husband offers to dismantle the nursery, you wonder if you will ever allow that to happen.

How can I? you think.

Too often, you linger in the doorway of Jack's room, hands brushing the soft green walls. The mobile above the crib - tiny stuffed animals suspended in quiet orbit, casting shadows in the lamplight - still as Jack. You trace the curve of the crib’s rail, remembering how his fingers curled around it, how he grasped yours with a strength you never expected from someone so small.

A lullaby hums in your mind, the one you sang countless times while rocking him. You press your palm to the mattress, imagining the warmth that once filled it, the soft rise and fall of his chest, the faint scent of lingering baby shampoo. Everything here is a monument that defies physics: a presence gone yet impossible to erase.

You lift a tiny sock, so small it could vanish in your hand yet impossibly heavy with memory, and imagine it still on his foot, kicking, seeking comfort. Your whispers spill like rain, each syllable a tether, a promise that even in absence, he exists here in this room, in every careful detail. You breathe in, close your eyes, and for a single, suspended moment, you are cradling him.

Your husband had suggested moving across town, but you'll never leave this house. The nursery is a shrine you cannot abandon; its walls hold him in ways your arms cannot. You begin to believe you love your baby, only three months old, more than you love your husband of eight years. Some days, you wonder whether, if forced to choose, you already have. Your mind wanders to the unthinkable: what if the world had taken him instead? The thought arrives uninvited, toxic, and you shove it down so violently that the shame is intangible.

The last thing you want to do is get dressed and go to a party at the neighbor’s house. The idea absolutely terrifies you. Agoraphobia has enveloped you since that day. There will be judgments when a perfectly healthy baby dies for no apparent reason. You know this because you once had those thoughts about others until it happened to you.

You acquiesce to attending the party because you owe it to your husband to at least try. He promises you only need to stay as long as you are comfortable. The idea of being comfortable ever again is ridiculous.

You move in slow motion as you ready for the party. Look too good, they'll talk - look terrible, they’ll talk anyway. The minute you walk out your front door for the first time, bile rises in your throat. Your heart hammers against your ribcage.

Your husband tells you he is proud of you and that you look beautiful. This makes you want to run back inside and hide in a fetal position under the covers again. But there is something in his expression that is so genuine.

Realizing you have nothing left to lose but your husband, you plaster on a smile.

“We don’t have to be okay,” he says. “Not for them. Just… for us. One step at a time.”

The party is raucous. The smells hit you first: perfume, wine, weed, cinnamon candles, and underneath it all, faint and cruel, a trace of baby powder clinging to someone’s clothing as they pass. It’s nothing like the soft scent of your son’s skin, but your body reacts anyway. Your throat tightens, and your breasts fill. Memory is a combination of all the senses.

You stare too long at their family photos - births and birthdays, toothless grins, little league teams, yearbook pictures. You spot a heavily pregnant woman, her hand resting protectively on her belly. Her eyes flick toward you and then dart away. She angles her body like a shield, as if sudden infant death is contagious.

The music is too loud, the lights too bright, and every laugh feels like a canyon you can't cross. You hover near the entryway, unsure whether to move forward or retreat.

The host notices you and rushes over.

“It’s so good to see you finally getting out!” She clasps your hands. “How are you really doing?”

Before you can answer, she says, “You’ll get through this. You need to move on.”

You are told by acquaintances, “Sorry for your loss.” As if Jack were a distant relative instead of your baby boy. They sweep toward you with smiles stretched thin, arms circling you in hugs you didn’t ask for.

Your husband lightly touches your hand. You try to breathe past the noise, the shifting bodies, the clatter of kitchenware. You want to scream that he was real. That he had a name. That you watched him sleep under the glow of an Elmo nightlight and counted every breath, never imagining the one he wouldn’t take.

Your husband’s fingers thread through yours. He squeezes, a silent code. We can do this.

Each cliché lands dull and heavy. Instead, you nod and begin cataloguing them:

“Everything happens for a reason.”

“You’re strong.”

“At least you know you can get pregnant.”

The words stack like mismatched plates in your arms. You imagine dropping them, watching them shatter, not apologizing for the mess.

You excuse yourself to the bathroom and lock the door. Under the soft lighting, you look almost normal. A thirty-something woman at a party. Hair in place. Lips steady. You press your knuckles to your mouth to keep from making a sound. The mirror reflects someone who can survive this. You don’t believe her.

You exit the bathroom only to realize you’ve lost sight of your husband in the crowd. Panic flickers. More comments. More smiles that would make better zippers. A hand on your shoulder that feels like trespass.

The host, tipsy now, offers you a drink you never asked for. “It’s safe,” she laughs. “You’re not breastfeeding.” Then she raises a glass: “To their next chapter.”

You nod because speaking requires oxygen you don’t have.

Then she asks if you’re trying for another baby. Trying. As if your son were a failed experiment.

“Yes, we are,” you say. “As a matter of fact, my husband and I just tried on your bed.”

You walk out the front door before your lungs give up entirely. Outside, cool night air presses against your skin. Wet grass. Fallen leaves. The air is wide enough to hold you.

You hear him before you see him. Your husband is on a bench near the property's tree line, his hands covering his face. He is sobbing.

You hesitate. You could go back inside - pretend you didn't witness his tears, but then you would be just like everyone else. Instead, you sit beside him.

“Every time I walk out our front door,” he whispers, “it feels like I’m leaving Jack behind.”

“No,” you say softly. “Leaving means you’re still living.” You press your palm to his chest. “Jack is right here. Always.”

He nods, shaking. You sit in the dark long enough for the night to settle inside you. You thought you were alone in this, that he had sailed ahead while you sank. But sitting here, hand in hand, you see you’re moving together, in your own ways.

You tell him what you had blurted out inside. He snorts. Then laughs, a sound absent for too long. You laugh too. When it fades, he rakes his fingers through his hair and sighs.

You kiss his damp cheek, stand, and pull him to his feet.

Together, you walk back into the party, hands clasped. Conversations momentarily suspend, then resume.

You both pause at the foot of the host’s staircase. For a moment, you picture Jack in the nursery - the soft green walls, the mobile that no longer turns. You brace for the familiar pull backward, the gravity that has kept you rooted for weeks.

It doesn’t come. Not because Jack is fading, but because loving him is somehow slowly changing shape.

Your husband waits, winks. You giggle.

You take his hand in yours and, unnoticed, you climb.