Kindness and cruelty

She could feel the effects that the pain medication was having on her with each sluggish movement of her body. The physical pain was manageable as a result, but nothing they gave her could do anything to ease the ache in her chest.

We’re terribly sorry, Ambassador. We did everything we could…

The words became nonsensical to her and she shut her eyes against them, hoping in vain that if she refused to acknowledge them, that they wouldn’t be real. She’d gotten to hold him briefly, hold the baby that would never cry or crawl, learn to walk or scrape his knees, fall in love or have his heart broken. She could have imagined that he was only sleeping if not for the unnatural stillness of that too small body. She examined ten tiny, perfect fingers, brushed a fingertip along a pale cheek in an effort to memorize every detail of him. Of Andrew.

Tears fell freely down her face when they took him until the sedative they’d given her kicked in and she fell into a blissful state of unconsciousness. She spent two days slipping in and out of awareness until she’d refused any medication on the third. She had a funeral to plan. Arrangements to make.

Her little boy was buried a week later.

Jocelyn took nearly two months to recover from the injuries she’d received from her fall and as a direct result of. It was nothing in the face of the emotional injury though, and that was something she wasn’t sure she would ever recover from.