The last time I was pregnant, somebody died. I’m not kidding. My pregnancy had, like, casualties.

“Oh, that’s a horrible, vulgar thing to say.”
Yes, it is.
But it’s true.
And it was horrible. And vulgar.

Before seminary I volunteered as a grief support group facilitator for teenagers who had lost a parent. Half of the kids in the group would describe the dreadful march toward death—pills, smells, false hopes, pain, the life that had given them life, vanishing, day after day.

But at least we were able to say goodbye, they would admit, looking sympathetically at the other half, who would lament the split-second tragedies—the heart, crushed by an unforgiving, invisible hand; the inebriated swerve, the squealing of tires and the crash of metal and glass. But, they would say in tenderness toward the others, it must have been so hard to see a loved one suffer for months and months.

They were so gentle with one another, and we all agreed grimly that death sucked, no matter how swiftly it came, or not.

But here, I am not a grief support-group facilitator, and I want to go on record: the sudden death is worse, for all the usual reasons, and one more: at the moment of the death, you’re rarely doing something important, something that would bear the weight of what is happening to your loved one. In that instant, you’re probably sitting on the toilet, or picking your teeth, or cleaning the cat box. (Would it have been easier, more holy somehow, if I’d been meditating when he died, or sorting clothes for the battered-women’s shelter, or even just writing, which he loved to do? Maybe, but probably not. It's just that the intrusion of death in the midst of the trivial and mundane seems like a particularly cruel mockery.)

In my case, I was lying in bed, staring blankly at the wall, when R got the call that Dad had died, swiftly, on his living room floor, while his panicked wife yelled for the neighbors, while the ambulance came screaming into the neighborhood.

I felt no Disturbance in the Force, no shuddering premonition. I was lying in bed on my left side (because that’s the best side for the mom’s digestion and for the baby’s circulation, and I am a good rule-follower), and I was wondering idly whether my child would be punctual, making her appearance in a week’s time, or whether she would keep me waiting.

I didn’t get to play the stop-time game, the one you play when you know the news is bad, when you arrive at the hospital and the chaplain escorts you into the Family Consultation Room with the door that closes and asks you to wait for the doctor, the one where for just a split second you can freeze the frame, or at least take a breath and prepare.

There was no breath, no preparation. I’d heard the phone ring, then later, footsteps on the stairs. There was no freeze-frame between my husband saying “collapsed” and “too late.”

No, with the sudden death, there is no holding your loved one’s hand. There is no whispered goodbye, no gathering of the family into that holy thin space where, even in the sadness, heaven seems to hover near to earth. There is none of that… just a crude, boorish interruption of the ordinary.

Holy thin spaces would come later, to be sure, but by then my loved one was no longer there to share in them.