Memento Mori

My daughter sometimes faints if she’s in pain. This time was a bit different.

You fall down.
You cry.
You hold your breath.
Seeming to die.

I almost call 911.
But you come to.
It was but a faint.
But the terror was true.

You scared dad yet again.
And I shed a small tear.
With your history.
I’m grateful you’re still here.

Daisy (my daughter) can sometimes faint if she’s in too much pain. (It’s probably a defense mechanism that resulted from the extreme pain she had to go through as an infant in the NICU.)

The fainting hadn’t happened for nearly a year, so I hoped it was gone. But yesterday, she fell onto a sharp stick that stuck out of the ground, precisely on the part of her belly where she was operated on numerous times as an infant.

This time her fainting—the stillness without breath—took so long that panic started to rise within me. In the past, she’d start breathing right after fainting. But this time, it took half a minute before she retook a breath.

During those 30 seconds, traumatic memories rose in my mind and body of the time when Daisy was just 10 months old: I was carrying her across the street at night—she wasn’t breathing—to get to one of my neighbors (a doctor) to help save her.

It’s a story I have rarely talked about, for I don’t personally know anyone who would understand the feeling of almost losing your child again.

So I just write poems instead…

But maybe I should attempt it a little bit: Imagine the feeling of going through hell for three months to save your baby girl, it working out beyond all odds. Then living in uncertainty for another half year, cause things might still go wrong. Then, right when you start to accept she probably won’t die during her sleep, she almost dies in your arms again.

I’m not sure if there’s a word for it, but I just call it retraumatization. And it’s been one of the most difficult things to get over in my life. And, as you see from what happened yesterday, it’s still there somewhat.

It will probably always be there.

So what the stoics call Memento Mori—the meditation on death or impermanence—is something I don’t have to consciously train or cultivate anymore. It’s always there.

But with it, also the constant gratefulness for life.

❤️

Jibran