The Funeral Where My Water Broke

Sharon did not cry in front of me that week. Sharon planned. She chose the casket, the flowers, the order of service, the guest list for the reception, all of it, while I sat in my own living room eight months pregnant and watched my husband’s mother build a funeral around her son without once asking me what I wanted, as though grief itself were a hardware order she had the authority to fill.

I let her. I want to be honest about that. I let her, because I did not have the strength that week to fight for a seating chart, and because some small, hopeful part of me believed that sharing this loss might finally soften something between us.

It did not soften anything. It hardened it.

The day of the funeral, the sky over the cemetery was the color of wet concrete, and the rain fell in that thin, patient way I mentioned, enough to bead on the black umbrellas but not enough to send anyone running for their cars. I stood at the head of the grave in a black dress I’d had to buy two sizes up, nine months pregnant to the day, my feet swollen into a pair of flats I’d never worn before that morning. Sharon stood across from me in a wide brimmed hat with a thin black veil pinned to it, her silver blonde hair set in the same smooth wave it always was, her spine so straight it looked like it hurt. Glen stood beside her in a dark suit, turning his coffee cup slowly in his hands, the steam rising off it into the cold air.

The graveside service was short. Pastor Earl Shaw, a soft spoken man who had baptized half the county at one point or another, read from the same passage he reads at every Fairhaven funeral, about a time to be born and a time to die, and I stood there with one hand pressed flat against the underside of my belly, feeling my son or daughter, I did not know which yet, turn over slowly as though even they could feel how wrong the day was.

It happened as the casket began its slow, mechanical lower into the ground. A pain tore through my lower back and down through my hips so suddenly that I gasped out loud, loud enough that the mourners nearest me turned. I felt a warm rush soak through my tights and into my shoes, and for one confused second I thought, absurdly, that I had simply lost control of my own body from the shock of the moment, before some calmer, more clinical part of my mind said the words out loud inside my head. Your water just broke. At your husband’s grave. Right now.

I reached for the nearest hand, which happened to be Sharon’s, still gloved in black lace, resting on the handle of her umbrella.