Come undone.

Who do you need?
Who do you love?
When you come undone

~ Duran Duran

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Outside an ambulance is still hot with exhaust. A man in an EMT uniform leans against the driver's side door. His face is crestfallen and his teeth press so hard into his bottom lip that perhaps he'll be next to need those emergency services.

A shrill sound pierces the humid summer air. A woman has fallen to her knees; the weight of whatever is pressing upon her is too much. Two other women flank her and try to help her to her feet. It doesn't work.

That cry is primal. A sound from so deep down in that cellular matrix that you just know it had to be built during the earliest embryonic phase. The kind reserved only for moments such as these; the kind that tells you the story even when you don't know all of the details.

Just before I heard that sound, I was daydreaming actually. Sifting through my brain and swirling inside of my own world while taking a simple walk down the concrete outside of Grady. Wondering about the four-dollar special at Subway and hoping it was one thing and not something else. And specifically, I was thinking that as long as it wasn't meatball marinara, I'd be fine with just about anything else. Mentally counting up how much money I'd spent in the last week on lunch and vowing to pack mine the following day. I stayed on that same path--on the street and in my head--which led me to the Children's Hospital right next door to Grady.

But then I heard it. That blood-curdling cry. I saw that woman buckling to her knees. Clawing at the air and coming undone. Not piece by piece but all at once. And the more those women on each of her arms tried to help her stand and console her the more her cries escalated. Louder, higher. . . up into the air. Like the haunting and longing howl of a lonely wolf; a gut-wrenching call of the wild.

And the second I heard it, I froze in my tracks. Because an alarm had been sounded and all under its clanging rattle were to take notice. To pause in deference, in acknowledgement.

So from across the street, I did. And from the corner of my eye I saw that two others had done the same. All of us stiff like statues. Eyes glistening, chests tightening, and making fleeting eye contact with one another from our separate squares of asphalt.

Eventually that woman and her two pillars of support gave in to gravity. There they sat, rocking and moaning in a tight huddle right there on the street in front of that ambulance. More people were surrounding them, their cries now confluent.

But still there was hers. Hers was different. Guttural, unsettling, primal.

And I knew. And since I did, I didn't even fight the hot tears that pushed straight out of my eyes and onto my cheeks on instinct. Nor was I surprised when I glanced back at that man whose back was against that ambulance and noticed his emotion, too. Fist pressed hard to his lips, eyes clenched tightly, face toward the heavens.

I still don't know the details. But, really, no explanation was necessary. The chilling in my bones when that cry left her lips was enough. The bell had tolled. A mother has lost her child.

And it turns out that meatball marinara was indeed the four-dollar special.

***
Now playing on my mental iPod, Come Undone by Duran Duran. Thank you, Simon, Nick and John for this beautiful song to accompany my thoughts.