Giving Birth I Floated to the Ceiling and Nearly Stayed

My daughter was two minutes old when I began to die. Nobody in that room knew it yet, including me. I only knew a great tiredness, a warmth spreading low in me that I mistook, in my new-mother happiness, for relief. It was not relief. It was blood, more of it than a body can spare, and I was slipping away on a rising tide of it while I smiled at the ceiling.

Then I was the ceiling. That is the closest I can put it. One moment I was flat on the bed with a heaviness pressing me down into the mattress, and the next I was up in the corner of the delivery room looking down, and I could see the top of the midwife's head and my own face gone the color of paper and my newborn being lifted away by a nurse to the warmer by the wall.

Everything got loud below me. Someone called a code. People I had not seen before came fast through the door. A doctor pressed on my belly hard enough that, if I had still been in my body, I would have screamed. But I was not in my body. I was calm up in the corner, and I felt no fear, and I remember thinking, with a detachment that shames me a little now, that the poor midwife looked so frightened and someone ought to tell her it was all right.

Because it did feel all right. Behind me, or above me, or in some direction bodies do not have, there was an opening, a tunnel of soft moving light, and out of it came a peace so complete that my whole life of worrying felt like a fever finally breaking. I turned toward it. I began to move toward it. It was warm and it was home in a way no house has ever been home, and I wanted it with everything I was.