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.

And then a thin sound reached me from very far below. My daughter, two minutes old, crying at the warmer. And I stopped.

I hovered there between the crying and the light, and I swear to you it was the hardest choice I have ever made or ever will, because the light was so kind and I was so tired and I knew, I knew, that the peace on that side was real and permanent. But that cry. That specific small furious cry of a person who had known me only from the inside and now needed me from the outside. I could not go toward the light with that sound in the world. I turned back.

Coming back into that body was like being poured into a vessel two sizes too small and full of broken glass. I gasped. A monitor changed its tone. Someone said, we have her, and someone else was crying, and the transfusion was already running dark red into my arm.

They told me afterward that I had lost more than half my blood, that it had been very close, that another few minutes might have gone the other way. I listened and nodded and did not tell them where I had been in those minutes, because I was too busy holding my daughter, who is nine now, who fell asleep on my chest that first night and every night for a year after.

I do not fear death. How could I, having stood at its warm open door. But I chose her over it once, at the very threshold, and I would choose her again a thousand times. When she is grown and I am old and the tunnel opens for me a second time, I will finally let it take me, and I will not be afraid, because I will have finished the thing I turned back to do. She was worth turning back for. She was worth everything.