The Unknown.

It's trite to say that your life can change in an instant, but of course, it can. I remember the day being overcast, a sky thick with clouds and with leaves that swirled around in the air, ominously forboding. I had a headache and my eyes were red-rimmed, whites cracked and webbed with red blood vessels, puffy pillows underneath them because I couldn't stop crying. It had been one of those episodes of crying that had grown uncontrollable. It began silently, then graduated to a stream of tears that seemed to fall endlessly then graduated to a great, rollicking sadness in which my shoulders shook and I was gasping for breath.

Usually, I care about hiding those emotions. We were sitting at Denny's, Mike and I, and I'd ordered some small thing that I never intended to eat. Mike looked worried. I think it was the heart, he said. She was lingering over the heart when we looked at the ultrasound. I swallowed. Just be patient, he was saying. It's almost one.

One o'clock was when the obstetrician had told us to return to the office. The nurse had left a message on the answering machine that we needed to come back in because of a finding on the ultrasound. From that time onward, I'd worried. Much as I tried to starve it, my worry went to seed. It had sprouted and grown until it finally burgeoned beyond my capacity to deal with it, beyond Mike's capacity for comfort, and we'd shown up at the doctor's office. I was a stewed-tomato face, and I no longer cared if the nurses or other patients found my emotional state upsetting.

We'd been sent away and told to return at one, so that the doctor could talk to us. My foraging mind continued to forage, under every rock and crevice, every nook and cranny, leaving no inch of unexamined. Was it the heart? What if the baby wasn't even alive at all? What if the baby had a condition in which it aged prematurely, in which we loved for several years and then had our hearts broken with such deep and pervading sorrow that we couldn't recover, ever? I didn't dare think of the possiblity that things would be OK. Too scary, too much room for disappointment to think that. The mind protects itself from pain in such moments, and I'd become like a wild animal, daring anyone to tell me that something was wrong with the baby.

The hour at Denny's seemed to stretch on, but The Uknown was not done with us yet. Doctor Leo told us that there was a deformity found on the ultrasound. It could be nothing, or. Or? I asked. We'd have to "deliver the baby early."

I was not stupid.

We weren't far along enough for the baby to survive outside the womb.

In the intervening weeks, The Unknown and I became acquaintances. At times I wanted to cry, but then found myself consoled by The Unknown. Stillbirth was not inevitable, and that was a source of comfort. At other times The Unknown was a scary dog chained outside a mobile home. He growled deeply and I felt sure that if I got closer, he would rip and tear me apart, until there was nothing left. There was nothing I could do to speed up time, so I walked with The Unknown, sometimes hand in hand, other times running away, wishing that I could outrun it.

I'm older now.

Would you like to know how it turned out? The findings were nothing. We have a healthy fifteen year old boy, and a younger daughter, as well.

But fifteen years later I sometimes recall the power of The Unknown. It is yin and yang, light and dark, despair, but also hope.