Morning has broken

You know those scenes in movies where the main character has suffered through some terrible tragedy and they are lying on their bed?   It's usually some sort of curled up fetal position, their hands by their head, their eyes staring blankly into space while REM's "Everybody hurts" or some other depressing music is playing.  The camera is close up, but off focus, at first.   Then, as the camera focuses, it zooms in on the pain in their eyes.  A few tears may fall.  Then, the camera pans away to show the rain pelting the window pane behind them, a director's attempt to echo the character's sorrow by manipulating their environment.  That's a fairly accurate representation of how I have woken up for the past week, just without the soundtrack.  Mornings are the absolute hardest part of my day.  In the morning, everything is so raw.  Sleep, when I can get it, is a cold salve over my open wound.  A welcomed forgetting.  But then morning comes, harsh and gray, and rips off that bandage with ferocious cruelty.   I am awake.  I am alive.  My baby is not.  I must face another day without her in my arms, which by the way, ache for her like they have ached for nothing before.  My pain medicine has worn off during the night, and my incision burns, another reminder of what my body went through in vain.  Everything hurts.  My body, my heart, my soul, my mind.  It takes more strength to get myself out of bed each morning than I ever thought possible.  If I let myself, I'd sleep all day long.  I'd curl beneath my blankets and block out the world.  95% of me pleads with myself, "Please, please, just let me forget.  Don't make me remember what happened.  Don't make me remember where I am and the reality of my life.   Let me sleep.  Let me escape.  It's too hard."   And it is too hard.   But I can't stay asleep.  I can't stay in bed.   What good will that do?  My baby is dead, but that doesn't give me an excuse to pull away from life.   I have to live.  I have to honor who she was by doing what she never got to do.  I have to live.  I have to pick myself up and heave my weary body out of bed every morning.  I have to shower.  I have to get dressed.  I have to go outside.   I don't want to do any of that, but as life has so cruelly shown me, it's really not about what I want anymore.   It is through me that she is remembered.  It is through me that her life is validated - and it is through me that her life will be vindicated.  I will not go quietly into that good night.  I will face the day.  Every day.  One raw and terrible morning at a time.