a house named grief

Today's guest post comes from Samantha Lyons. She writes, "I am a 25 year old childless mother. I was expecting my first son, a healthy boy grown in a healthy pregnancy, March 23rd, 2014. I delivered him March 27th 'Still.' Cord accident." Samantha blogs at Life After Hayden.

There is a house named Grief filled up like hoarding with all that I cannot have,

which will never belong to me.

Under every floorboard soft blue bonnets and neatly folded sleepers.

In every crevasse crumbs of poignancy.

In every window stains of steamy crying and hot tears.

If you listen closely you can hear the young woman wailing.

Stacks in every room from floor to ceiling of your graduation, your first step, kindergarten finger paintings and that first birth cry I never got to hear.

You can’t walk through the halls you have to hover, there is no room left for feet.

I boarded up the tiny closet, inside the words “No Heartbeat”.

On the front porch an old wicker chair is rocking. It waits for you, it wants to put you to sleep at sunset.

Nothing grows in the garden, and the trembling Weeping Willow on the lawn is me.


On the door there is a frantically painted red mark. I screamed in the night searching for the animal, the offering.

I pleaded and bargained and offered trades of all sorts.

Please not this, anything but this.

I am too late.

It has already taken the first-born son who lived here.


What is in your grief-house? What have you done with the things--the clothes, the rocking chair--that were to belong to your baby who died?