See? Magic.

I am sitting on my front porch with a cup of coffee, watching the sun set on the brick building in front of me. The sun behind me, and the world is a beautiful place, filled with red and yellow and gold. My chair is comfortable, my coffee is good. The dogs are sniffling around the front yard. I can hear the sounds of children, in those last few moments before the call to come in for the night will go around the neighbourhood. It was a busy week of travel and meetings, it was a busy Saturday of errands and household things, and I have this brief time – with nothing but to sit and enjoy, watch the changing of the light.

They call this the magic hour.

What is grief, but a form of magic, I ask you? What is the terror and the pain and the horror that I found myself in four years ago, but a form of magic, a spell, an incantation that was thrown over me? It is easy to imagine the vile and loathsome creature that took my son away from me – it is easy to think of a cave, a foul smell and the guttural words of a spell. That seems as good and as reasonable an explanation of any about why tragedy struck me, struck mine, struck you and struck yours.

Magic, all around us. Old order magic with no waiving of hands, muttering of incantations. Magic, hiding in plain view. Magic that is good and magic that is so terribly evil it is impossible to behold. Magic held into balance, just barely.

And it seems a reasonable explanation that the magic of that spell would slowly wear off, that I would be able to find my way in the world. I look the same as I did back then, more or less, I walk and talk but I am utterly changed. See? Magic.

I believe in goodness and mercy, all the days of my life, in spite of what happened. Perhaps I believe more strongly now. See? Magic.

And on my front porch, watching the liquid line of gold fall towards the ground, I can be captivated by sudden and ephemeral beauty. See? Magic.

Grief then a form of magic. It seems appropriate to think that – the best explanation. So much of our world seems fragile, improbable. The quickness of the life and death, the peace of a Saturday night sunset. The curve of my son’s ear, the way his finger was crooked just like mine. See? Magic.

And this. The world I live in now. This wholeness and this peace that I find has come over me. My contentedness and my delight in beauty. I wouldn’t have believed it possible. See? Magic.

It is customary, at the end of a Glow Post, to ask a series of questions. This is my last post on Glow, and I would beg your leave to simply say thank you. It has been an honour for me to write here. I thank you that you read. I wish you comfort, and when you are ready for it, magic.

Wild Nights

The Irish, I am told, are fond of sex during wakes. This is very likely one of those gross cultural abstractions, one that bears no resemblance to the real world.

And yet, in those early days, I understood the terrible and fierce appeal of celebrating life and love in the midst of death. I understood carnality.

I wanted my husband in a way that I had never wanted him before Gabriel’s death. I wanted him because I wanted to shake my fist at death. I wanted to proclaim the wonder of life and lust and joy in the midst of such sorrow.  I wanted to get back to what I only enjoyed for a brief period.

I don’t think I have ever told him this.

I was ripe, verdant when I was pregnant. After years of trying to not get pregnant – living life a bit shriveled up, convinced I would be the teenager, the young woman who ruined her life getting pregnant. (If only I had known.) I lived with the baggage of a Christian background, guilt and miasma heaped on me. It isn’t that I never enjoyed sex, but I never fully let go. I may have been married for 7 years, supposedly able to copulate guilt free, but there was no revelry.

At the end of my first trimester, and in a way I had never understood in all my 29 years, I just relaxed. I enjoyed, luxuriated. I loved sex. It was spectacular. My body had finally performed as warranted, and it was my time to revel in this. I told you I felt verdant – but it was more than that. I was full, round, fruit ripened in sunshine.  I was soft and lush - fecund.  I felt not just sexy, but sensual. I loved that word then and I still almost hate it now.

Would it shock you to know I was angry I lost this after Gabriel died? I wasn’t verdant after all. There was no ripeness in me.

I wondered, worried, fretted, freaked - was I forever destined to yearn and dream for that feeling of fullness again – all of that roundness and all of that ripeness – would I never taste it on my lips again, feel my body laid back and splayed out in glory? Maybe 24 weeks, well, 12 weeks of good sex maybe that was it.  And if that was it, if 3 months had been paradise and I was in paradise lost, why on all of this green earth hadn’t we had sex every day? Why hadn’t I rolled around, found satiation every chance I got?

I haven’t really looked back like this – applied the careful thought to sex that I do to grief. I have found the experience remarkable. I have found that the words, the images and the adjectives that spring to mind to be surprising.

Continuing the discussion from Jess’ post, as yourself or as anonymous. Use words or images or snippets of poetry. Do you regret? Yearn? Wish? Is there loss in this as well?

No Change in Me

I suppose it’s because I’m leaving my job. I suppose it’s because I’m leaving the industry I’ve worked in for six years, I’m leaving the place that I conceived, carried my son and went back to after Gabriel’s death. I suppose it’s because of that I feel this need to return to places.

To stand in the bathroom I used to run to and cry in. To walk through the library I walked in that day it was raining, when I saw the statue of the beautifully pregnant woman. To walk through the city square, to walk past the desk I sat at. To sit in the coffee shops I have sat in. The meeting rooms. The elevators.

I am not the same woman, but I worked in the same place. I could touch the places I touched when I was pregnant and there was some comfort in reaching back. I leave this place where Gabriel concretely existed.

These places in their way sheltered me: the people who actively gave me comfort and succour and the people who utterly ignored my bereft-ness – they participated in my grief if only by watching it.

I don't want to leave
But you can't live for free
You can't eat the air
And you can't drink the sea

The new job is amazing. It’s an opportunity of a lifetime. It’s a brilliant move for my career.

You see, I couldn’t take this job if I was the mother of a living four year old. It simply wouldn’t be possible. I will commute, back and forth, to another province, 2 hours each way on flights – gone from Sunday night until Friday night.  I couldn’t be the woman running through airports with a laptop case and a suitcase, with a child at home. I do not believe I would be motivated enough to live a peripatetic existence for a job.

There is a place in me that doesn’t want to move forward because it believes if I stay here long enough, Gabriel, that life I thought I was going to have will find me. Suddenly I will wake up, and the room next to me will have a four year old, red headed boy in it.

And I leave this place, I leave Gabriel, I leave all of those dreams behind. I face the hard truth: there is nothing for me in this place any more. I have gone as far as I can here. Moving forward requires moving on. To stay here would be to bide my time, waiting for a thing that can never come.

 Flikr: Alaz 

There will never be a little red haired boy in the room next to me. There is just me, with my suitcase, waiting to catch a plane.

So I'll join in the leaving like all of the rest
Montreal, Calgary, Vancouver West

*****

Murray McLauchlin’s song I have quoted from, No Change in Me, talks about East Coasters moving away for work, and their terrible yearning for home. Grief, at least it seems to me, is a terrible yearning for what we thought home would be. As my career takes me further from the way I thought my life would be, I realize baby death means saying good-bye to unexpected things in unexpected ways. Have you had an unexpected good-bye?

Snowglobes of Tradition

Grief says “You ate the Eggs Benedict 15 days after you held your son in your arms. You ate the Eggs Benedict consumed with the memory of his gasping for breath and dying. You did all of this because it was tradition on Christmas morning. Did it make any difference?”

It’s hard to think about tradition without thinking about family. It’s hard to think about tradition without thinking about your parents and it is impossible to think about tradition without imagining handing down your traditions to your children.

I don’t, to be perfectly frank, have much of a family. My mother and I are, at least for the present, estranged. Whether or not that estrangement will end and if it will end is up to her. My other family is in BC. I have no siblings. All of this makes holiday tradition ever harder. It often feels like I have to create a new community for each occasion. Without children, I confess, I feel lost at Christmas. Without children I wonder if I look pathetic as I decorate the house and plan meals.

I like the Eggs Benedict Christmas morning, I like the prime rib with Yorkshire pudding. I like the stockings, I like the tourtiere. You could write my epitaph thus: She prepared a lot of food and there was no one to eat it.

I wanted a large family that did the same things with every year. I wanted to have the same faces around the Christmas table, many faces. What I wanted, or at least what I thought I wanted was for things to never change. I thought if I didn’t have to build my own community each holiday, if my community was built in, then holidays wouldn’t be so hard, so lonely and feel so futile.

I thought, by having children, I would have frozen Christmas into a perfect snow globe for all time.

 Flickr Ali 505Except, that’s not what life does, that’s not how families work. That’s not even how traditions go.

There are no snow globes of tradition, except those we create in our imagination and memory. That's why we dream about tradition - because we can create perfection in our imagination or in our memory. We have no such guarantees in our forward-thinking life. It is possible, even likely, that I could have had 4 children and spent Christmas thirty years hence all alone.

Age, birth, death, marriage and divorce change our traditions. We bring in new ones, we toss out old ones.

I can change my thoughts on tradition. I can ease up, I can be more flexible, but that belies a single truth: I don’t want to be more flexible. I don’t want to have to give up the notion of tradition and I certainly don’t want  to give up on the snow globe of perfect imagination.

I wanted to hang on to all of this. I wanted to pass this on to my children. I wanted to tell them that I ate Eggs Benedict every Christmas morning for all of my life and they should too. I wanted stockings, overflowing with goodness, carefully placed on their beds while they slept.

This year I looked at what I thought that perfect snow globe would be, what I really wanted and I realized it is not possible. My snow globe will always be missing something – someone.

In the middle of the snow globe, mixed in with the snow is a heavy dusting of grief. This year, the fourth year after Gabriel’s death, I am finally seeing it. Grief at Gabriel's death, at life with no children swirls around the holidays because it pervades our traditions.

And maybe that’s where the struggle really lies. Maybe the need to examine the traditions I continue, maybe the frustration at creating my own community for every holiday really comes from this: they are but a remembrance of what I don’t have and what I can't do. Without living children I am powerless to create that perfect snow globe. Anything I can create, through what traditions I maintain, through what community I can build will never match to what I imagined.

Tell us: How have your traditions changed? Do you approach the holidays the same way? What sort of community do you include now? How did Christmas go for you?

Coming Back to You

I looked for you in everyone / And they called me on that too
I lived alone but I was only / Coming back to you

I remember him. He is with me – a mostly weightless load now. He reminds me of what was going to be and what wasn’t. He is the future I thought I would have, the person I thought I would be. Now we are two separate galaxies, orbiting each other. We move in synchronous orbit most of the time, aware of each other and living our separate lives. A few times a year we meet in near orbit. Never quite touching, but the could have been becomes close enough to what is, causing an almost singularity. Sometimes the crash is soothing – I feel him more closely. Sometimes, like all space events, the result is dust and light and heat and brokenness.

The orbits have fixed points: times in the year when we come close to each other and I plan for them: readily watching for a galaxy I can visualize with a naked eye. Other times I stare in the sky looking and unable to see him. I shrug my shoulders and decide that he must be at apogee orbit – the furthest away from me he can be, travelling slowly.

And the fields they're under lock and key /Tho' the rain and the sun come through
And springtime starts but then it stops /In the name of something new
And all the senses rise against this /Coming back to you

I am a woman at an offsite meeting, with pumps and pearls and we are standing outside the board room on a break. We are chatting, these new colleagues of mine and I. I don’t know how the topic turned to midwives. On our team, one of the guys is married to a midwife and one is the son of a midwife. That’s about the only explanation I have about why we should be a team of analysts, talking about childbirth.

In those uncertain days after Gabriel’s death, I talked about him. I talked about him to everyone. Objects in orbit move slowly at apogee – at perigee, where they are close to us, they speed up. I knew those moments would be quick and I thought the force of remembrance and words could slow the orbit down – keeping him closer to me for longer. I know now that there is nothing that can act against the force of geosynchronous orbit. He must needs move away, hitting apogee so that he can come back to perigee.

I did not tell them it was me when I talked about high risk pregnancies. I did not tell them about my son, I did not tell them about the stroke, about almost dying. I did not tell them of the small bouquet of flowers at a funeral 4 days before Christmas, from mummy and daddy. I did not tell them about being alive when you most want to be dead. I referred to another woman. I hid who I was.

Even in your arms I know / I'll never get it right
Even when you bend to give me / Comfort in the night
I've got to have your word on this / Or none of it is true
And all I've said was just instead of / Coming back to you

At this point – this point of far-ness in orbit, he is not there for anyone to see. He is a fleck against a pitch black sky; far away and moving slowly through the cold. I cannot explain to someone who is not accustomed to looking. I cannot move their eyes, talking in arc seconds to describe his path. I cannot say, I think he’s out past the Kuiper Belt, in amidst the asteroids just past Pluto. You can’t see him, but he’s there and he will come back to me.

I am the woman before you, in her pearls and black suit. I am the woman talking about risk and cost-benefit analysis, with a black berry on her hip. I am exactly as you see. I am a childless woman. When we are far apart I am nothing more than what you see.

It’s just this: sometimes you might see me turn towards the stars. I look at the sky, turning my face to the darkness. He is far away at that moment, too far to see with naked eye. It’s ok. He is coming back to me.

Do you find you ever feel like you are 2 separate people? Do you ever hide your child, or at least choose the times you talk about your baby? Do you map your journey through the year almost as an orbit? And do you find that you are more easily able to let your child go, knowing that they will come back to you in certain times and places?

(Lyrics from Leonard Cohen’s beautiful song “Coming Back to You.” There are many versions of this song, from Jennifer Warren’s album Famous Blue Raincoat to Leonard himself. The most beautiful version I have heard and indeed the one that inspired this post is performed by a Canadian Band called The Once.)

After

I am embarrassed to admit it, but my first thought was that she would be alone. All alone.

I should be embarrassed; maybe I should even be ashamed. I know that I cultivate, have cultivated, will continue to cultivate relationships. I know that I create friendships, relationships, a sense of other in my life.   But my first thought, when I heard that he died in that accident, that it was so sudden and unexpected, that he was dead, my first thought was that she was all alone. She had no one now.

I should know better. I should believe better. That will be me that one day.

It’s just. . .well, look. Frank* and Cassandra didn’t ever have children. I don’t know why, I didn’t ask. I know he had children from his first marriage, but after 15 years they didn’t ever have them together. And suddenly, quite young, he was dead. There she is with a house and travel plans and 2 cars and all of the trappings of togetherness and she’s alone.  There’s a life time of shared memories and no one to share them with. We hold on to the good times and make sense of the bad times by sharing stories. Very often our partner is the closest participant in the best and worst times of our lives.

I cannot help but think, when that partner dies, we lose part of our story.

One day Mr. Spit will die. Statistics tell me that he will likely die before me. He is older and male, and right now as a woman I am apt to live longer.

One day I will be Cassandra. It could be any day, really. If I have learned nothing in these almost four years, I have learned that tragedy can strike without warning, arriving into any life.

I like that song, Live Like You Were Dying, but the truth is, you can’t live like that. Real life intrudes. You can’t live each day as if it were the last. Living life well actually requires that you believe your life is an ongoing concern. You pay your bills, buy groceries for next week, put money aside for trips and plan celebrations. You live as if you have a future. You plan to make more memories, to continue the story together.

One day Mr. Spit, this man who is my comfort, my shield, my laughter, my joy, my companion and my delight, will be gone. I will still be here. I will live without him. When he is gone, he will only live in my memories. I know that when he is gone, I will follow. Perhaps shortly or perhaps many years later. 

It’s not the following part. It’s the in-between. The time I am here and he is not. I would wish that I could go first, but I think that simply replaces my pain with his. It doesn’t make me feel any more at ease to transfer my sorrow to him. One of us will be alone.

So what? The experts tell me that those of us who are childfree develop friendships and relationships to help us as we age.

Isn’t that a bit calculating? Think, just for a second. Shall I walk up to a woman like me, a woman without children and ask “Will you be my friend? For now, but also when I am old? Will you be my friend because at some point bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh will die, and I have no children and I will need a friend? I am a good friend and I am willing to do this for you as well?” And shall I find a man, a man who is handy and shall I tell him that I put a hole in my finger with a cordless drill and I cannot use a hammer to save my life, and will he be my friend? I will bake him cookies and knit him the odd pair of socks and remember his birthday and have no expectations other than a sincere wish that he understands the inward mysteries of toilets.  Shall I go looking, calculatingly, for others to tell my story to, when Mr. Spit is gone?

Is this what people do? Perhaps they are not so calculating, perhaps they do not engage in my tendency to think everything out to the nth degree.

Still.

Cassandra  is alone, Frank is dead, and one day so shall my husband be.  The story, the memories, all it will end.

And I will be alone.

Do you worry more after the death of your child, about what happens when your partner dies? Do you agree that our partners very often share the closest parts of our story? Do you wonder who will keep the good and the bad parts of the story, the closest memories of what made you, you?

*It is always a struggle when you blog, to write your own thoughts and stories and deal lightly with the places that your stories and thoughts intersect with the lives of others. The story is true, but I have altered names and circumstances, choosing to deal lightly with a person in grief.