If I could talk with the animals

We shaved our cat.

Correction: We had our cat shaved, by a professional cat groomer.  When Mr. ABF told me the cost in a rather "Shit, I'm sorry, this is a killer" way, I said, "Seriously, what is a good price for SHAVING A CAT?!"  Talk about a thankless job.

Tucker, our Maine Coon that we rescued off the cold streets of Chicago, is sixteen this year, and has decided to stop grooming himself.  Because of his thick, long coat, it happened rather overnight-ish, and we suspected his thyroid was wonky again, and guiltily trudged him into the vet expecting to be berated for negligence.  The vet was wildly sympathetic, his thyroid and everything else was normal/great (despite the fact that we occasionally miss a dose), and she sighed and said, "He's sixteen.  Sometimes cats just get tired of grooming themselves."

So he came home a thin wee rather-freaky skinny thing, and I ran out and bought a comb determined to get in the habit of grooming him once a week.  Despite the crazy schedule, the daily medications both cats get, houseguests, heat, a toddler, a garden that desperately needs harvested, laundry, playdates, car maintenance, birthday parties . . .  I will take care of this cat.  I love this cat.  He has stood by me, through everything.

:::

I distinctly remember the afternoon, a whole geological era ago now, that I went into the bathroom and realized I was miscarrying my first pregnancy.  I went on the bed to sob and yell and call the OB and catch my breath and when I came out of my fog I realized I was surrounded by pets:  both cats (Tucker and Kirby) and my dog (Max) had silently but loyally jumped on the bed and taken positions all around me.  To comfort?  Protect?  They knew, they obviously knew I was upset and came just to be.  Just to be near me.  To abide.  When I came home from the D&C months later ("leftover product" wouldn't ya know) I scooped them all up and rubbed chins and told them a baby was coming, but I'd never forget them.

The night I labored with Bella (two years and four months after the crying on the bed incident, thank you infertility) I went into the living room and told my husband to sleep.  The contractions were tough, but far apart, and I'd need him later.  Tucker however, abandoned his usual digs for the night and sat on the floor right next to me.  All night.  He never left my side.

None of the pets really dug Bella; there is in fact a lovely and slightly sad picture of Tucker peering around a couch days after bringing Bella home from the hospital.  Here was a screaming, loud, running being grabbing for their tails and occasionally succeeding in clenching tufts of hair.  They all dealt, but clearly missed us, the zookeepers.  Max eventually forgot about frisbee lunches, Kirby had to give up the chokeable glitter balls he used to retrieve like a dog, and we began to ease up on Tucker's grooming.  There was plenty of love to go around, but never quite enough time.

We moved to our new house five years ago, and while Max has always seemed a bit out of sorts in the city, Tucker and Kirby especially seemed to thrive here.  There were window seats galore, nooks and corners, heated tile floors.  And again, the night I got up early to phone the hospital to see about my induction for Maddy, Tucker came and sat on the couch next to me.

There was no screaming being this time.  Well, there was, but it was a familiar face who I suppose at least didn't grab at tails or tufts of fur.  I wailed, I sobbed, I curled up in a quiet ball on the bed.  I stayed up late, I had to go on antidepressants because I couldn't bring myself to get up and care for my toddler.  I was distracted and distraught, I didn't speak to people, I usually remembered to walk the dog and feed the animals.  But for all intents and purposes, I ignored the lot of them.  I hated taking Max for walks because it meant I had to go out in public.  I forgot about them, moved around my house as though it was unoccupied -- hell, moved around my life as though it was unoccupied. I floated and bobbed around my daughter and husband, my neighbors, my family, the people at the grocery.  My pets were nonentities, just anonymous flotsam, bobbing along with me, camouflaged against the dark water.

Three months after Maddy died we adopted Buddy, a one-year-old golden retriever who had been abandoned at an emergency vet's office after a run in with a car that left him with two plates in his back leg.  We wondered what we were doing, as did a few family members.  "Are you sure this a good idea?" tentatively asked my father in one phone call.  So concerned were we by this crazy half-baked idea that we even ran it by our grief therapist -- was adopting a dog at this moment so blatantly, obviously, Freudian-ly, obnoxiously replacing?  I was on antidepressants for not being able to lift my body in order to keep my toddler form tumbling down the stairs and out the front door, did we really need another dog?  Another pet? Something else to deal with and try and keep alive?  "Well," said the therapist with a smile, "I think if you want him you should take him home."

And we did.  Buddy helped me realize I could in fact take care of a mammal in need of medical assistance.  But perhaps more importantly, he made me wake up and rediscover my other animals again.  I knew when we brought him in the house we'd need to make a conscious effort to let the other animals know we still loved them, and here I hadn't let them know that for months.  I began petting and walking, allowing cats in my lap and grooming.  I threw balls in the yard, I drove to water therapy, doled out treats, I scratched chins and tummies.  And like those awesome human friends of mine who didn't take the lapse in communication personally, my pets quietly and lovingly took up their old positions.  The foot of the bed, the door when we came home, the computer keyboard.  They were simply abiding, the whole time.

I scooped them all up and whispered, "There is no baby.  But I will still love you."

:::

An experiment mentioned previously on this website concluded that people feel less pain when someone else is simply in the room with them rather than undergoing the trial alone.  I would like to posit that the same goes for furry beings as well:  they couldn't hold my hand or say her name, they didn't bring me roasted chicken or fresh kleenex.  But nor did they sting me with empty platitudes, and stop talking with me entirely after ignoring them for three months.  They didn't assume I was angry with them for not paying attention to them for a spell, and pee all over everything, literally or figuratively.  They never stood us up (well, ok, maybe occasionally for a squirrel -- I can excuse that), or grew tired of tears.  They continued to silently pile on the bed, or next to me during a late night on the couch or computer, and just be with me.

Tucker's curled up next to me on the floor, as I write this, his soft short coat curled in a tight ball with his head under his leg.  Buddy is here, too, sound asleep.  But near, always near.  Amazingly, they never lost faith in me.

There will be no more babies, and the Inn is full -- there will be no more pets.  (Except that wee fish.)  I am here now, for you.  Thank you so much you naughty, adorable, shedding, loyal animals, for being there for me.

Do you have pets of any sort?  Did you have them before/during or acquire them after the death of your child(ren)?  Have they hindered your grief in any way(s), or helped in any way(s)?  Did those ways surprise you?  Oh, and rub those ears for me, would you?

comparatively speaking

I believe if you got a room full of widows whose husbands had died of the same form of cancer, each woman would still silently compare herself to those around her.

I wish my husband had survived longer after the diagnosis.

Thank goodness my husband went fast and it didn't drag out.

She's lucky, her kids are still young and in the house to lend support.

She's lucky, her kids are grown and she has time and space to grieve by herself.

I wish I had been married longer.

She's so young -- she's got her whole life ahead of her.  No way I'm getting married again.

And so on.

I also believe, especially early on, that it's a good thing -- it's even a healthy thing -- to compare yourself to others in similar situations.  I think it puts parameters on your grief, and helps set the boundaries of exactly what issues you personally need to move through. 

At first, unsurprisingly, you probably think yourself the worst off in the room -- from newness and the raw angry wound if nothing else.  And that's ok, by dint of still bleeding, you probably are.

But the nice thing about support groups, either in person or online is that you realize you're not alone:  others have gone through the same thing.

Well, not quite the same thing.

And there's the rub:  we're all so alike, we occupy a tidy little corner of the internet where we share macabre humor and toss around familiar euphemisms, but then we hang around long enough and realize there are some odd angles and edges.

Some lose babies earlier in the pregnancy than others

Some lose two children -- or more -- in the same event

Some lose two children -- or more -- over time

Some have to birth already dead babies

Some have to make decisions about life support

Some have to make decisions about termination

Some have seemingly healthy babies who are rudely snatched from their hands -- metaphorically -- weeks after their birth

We ponder these differences, and hell, it doesn't really matter does it?  No of course not, many of us pronounce, pain is pain, and we begin to comprehend still other parts of the stories:

Some don't have living children

Some have to explain what happened to living children and help them grieve, too

Some spouses leave

Some suffer infertility along with babyloss

Some subsequent pregnancies don't work, either

Some had horrible medical treatment

Some have long-standing issues with depression

Some were still suffering from other losses in their lives when their child(ren) died

And I think it's still good - and still healthy -- to compare, and realize, you know, I'm not the worst-off person in the room.  

And I speak rather ironically because of course, if you're following my examples here, no one is the worst off person.  Everyone is worse off.  Everyone is better off.  It depends to whom you're referring, to whom you're speaking, whose mind you're in.  Are we counting that refugee I just read about in the paper?  It just depends.

I'm not sure whose particular set of circumstances I'd rather have:  they all suck, and at least I'm familiar with mine.

+++

I gather -- for better or worse -- that this sort of self-comparison is probably a chunk of how we form our identities and selves.  Some comparisons are merely factual, some make you gasp in relief, and some perhaps make you feel a little less of yourself.

He's taller than me.

I'm lucky I like my job.

Her skin is always so clear and smooth, and mine looks like the lunar surface.

And it's what we do with this information that's important:  it shouldn't make you feel like you get a prize of some sort just because your car is a newer model, but nor should it take you in the dumps if your neighbor's lawn looks better this year.  It is what it is.

We sometimes bandy this idea around and call it the Pain Olympics, the idea that some play games to set themselves up as the worst, the bottom of the well, the stink of the trash-heap.  

And I still argue it's good and it's healthy as long as at some point in time -- and it usually takes a bit of time for the wound to cease throbbing and your head to stop spinning -- that you realize maybe, just maybe that person had it worse.  And now that I think about it, that person I read about in the paper?  She did to.  And he did.  And her.  

And suddenly you have perspective, and compassion, depth and breadth to your experience.  You're able to welcome someone with a far different set of circumstances, realizing exactly where your circles cross each other in similar shaded places, and where you diverge.  And you also begin to realize that what one person considers lucky, another considers a cosmic kick in the ass.  What one person deems a lousy situation sounds like a symphony to you, comparatively.  

And before long you're beginning to understand not just how your situation fits into the world, but how your pain does.  And that there are other kinds of pain, and maybe "more" and "less"  and "better" and "worse" really aren't good ways to go about comparing these sorts of things, anyway.  That actor who tried to kill himself when he was 22?  His baby didn't die (he didn't have one as far as I could tell), but you know, in his head, his life was so bad he wanted to die.  My life was never that bad.  That was the day I picked my chin up a bit, felt sympathy for this poor guy, and realized I could keep stumbling.

Who are we to judge what's better and worse, anyway?  Maybe my neighbor uses pesticides on that ultra green lawn.  Maybe my newer car gets lousy mileage.  Maybe I just need to be with my situation and deal with it on it's own terms and use other people for support and inspiration when it suits.

That's the problem with comparisons.  You sometimes don't know the backstory, the consequences of the outcomes.  Maybe we shouldn't do this so much, after all.

+++

Way way back, when I took yoga, in the beginning, the teacher reminded us practically every 5 minutes not to be competitive!  Don't look at your neighbor!  Ok, well go ahead and look if you must, but don't get down on yourself!  Because every person is different, every body is different, every student will have a strength and a weakness.  Work on your weaknesses, don't be ashamed to use props.  Revel in your strengths, but know that you can always grow -- the pose can always be better, made more difficult, held longer.

And I realized, in-shape-runner-me, that my soccer-muscly quads that allowed me to sit in air chair for an eternity outright forbade me from bending over and touching my toes, my hamstrings were so tightly wound.  Meanwhile, the 60 year old lady next to me had her head through her legs and was examining the backs of her ankles.

Grief is like this, I've come to realize.  Pain is like this.  It's mine, it's mine to hold and ponder and hold up and examine.  It's mine to improve.  I appreciate your sympathy in my down moments, and I really appreciate it when you find inspiration in my good moments.   

It's not better or worse, it just is.

How often do you compare yourself and your story to others?  How does it make you feel overall?  Has this changed over time? How do other people's stories shape you and your story?  Do they at all?  Do you find yourself gravitating more towards people at the same place in grief, or who went through a similar situation? (Or both?) 

wild is the wind

photo by KevinGrahame

On the west coast of New Zealand overlooking the fierceness of the Tasman Sea, the trees growing in the rocky crags of the shoreline jut sideways. The branches on the sea side are barren, twisted. The force of the wind changes their structure, the way their nature demands to grow beaten into submission. The limbs bend permanently off to the side pointing towards the land. "Go this way," they point. "Go away from the brutal sea." They morph from the relentlessness of the coastal wind. Their shape is the shape of the wind. It is the shape of abuse. Sometimes when I think back on how captivating those trees were, how haunting, how few pictures I took of them, yet how often I think of them, sometimes I think that shape is the shape of love.

Let the wind blow through your heart, for wild is the wind.

All the love songs are written about Lucia. All the heartbreak songs. All the songs about loss and want and ache. All of the songs. I want to write about her too, but I can't seem to find the words. I know nothing about Lucy except that she isn't here. And the cadence of her not being here is like the wind beating on me, changing me. I relent. My branches bend over, growing uncomfortably sideways, damaged, impossible. I bend from the love. The love disguised as sadness and grief. Sometimes I get confused by that, thinking that I am bending from the hurt, but it is love that bends me, that points me away from everything else. I look debilitated. I feel debilitated. Until, suddenly, I realize that it has become so much a part of who I am, I am not uncomfortable anymore. And until it became so much a part of who I am, the way I was, unbending and sure of the world, makes no sense anymore.

You're Spring to me, all things to me.

I never thought I’d survive the death of one of my children. That is what I used to say when I would hear a horror story about stillbirth, or infant death. "Oh, I would never survive," I would muse. I thought I would turn into dust and ash and be carried off, a bit of me left everywhere until I was nowhere at all. I'd close my eyes to banish the thought of it. Cross myself. Throw salt over my left shoulder.  Touch wood.  Hold my breath.  Make a wish. Knock on wood.  Throw salt over my shoulder. Whisper on the wind.

Let me fly away with you.

Maybe I really thought I would never survive it, or that is simply all the further I could think of such a scenario. It seemed so horrid, I wouldn't dignify imagining how it would really be. Maybe I said things like that because I thought I was not the kind of person that babies die inside of. I remember that feeling of talking myself out of the anxiety of the stillness. I felt silly for being afraid. I felt silly. I used to think I was a humble person. Confident, perhaps, but humble. Humility, in fact, was my religion. That seemed the key to a spiritual existence. Humility and compassion. Hand in hand. Then I thought I was humble because I lost so much. Before that, I thought I was humble because I didn't think I was the prettiest, smartest or most talented person and that realization didn't floor me. My philosophy of life was simple: "I am not anyone special. And neither are you."

I suppose now I see humility differently. Humility to me is accepting that I am not capable of transcending my humanness. My child died in me not because I am bad, or good, or humble, or arrogant, or I deserved it or didn't deserve it. She died because I am human. I am not a terrible person, just a person. And I am changed by the grief. My branches own the hurt perhaps further are the hurt of simply being human and loving so much.  

Wild is the wind. So wild.

Though I thought I'd never survive my child's death, I survived it. What did I think I would do? Kill myself? Expire from lack of wanting to survive? After living through the death of my child, I realized that surviving isn't the hard part. You can live despite yourself and in spite of yourself. You can punish, abuse, disengage with you, you can cut yourself off from everything. You can try to will life to stop, but it won't. You wake up everyday and remember what happened again. And your arms bend a little more.

It is the thriving that feels impossible. It is the hope that gets choked, the loneliness that settles onto your bones like an old wet wool coat, useless and bulky in its wetness, and uncomfortably heavy. It is the juxtaposition of the old, wet, wool coat, and the wind that blows through your heart. And the wind that blows through the holes in you. Your arms tire. Everything is tired. But you still live.

My love is like the wind.

There is a hole in me that seems bigger than any one person could have ever filled, especially someone so little and dead. The wind blows through her tree this morning, moving the tiny Buddhist bell and the flags that send a prayer off to the corner of the globe. That prayer can never be answered. And still I pray for the impossible--a moment with Lucia again. A moment. One tiny wisp of her. The grief that whirled in me after she died touched all the other grief in me. I can see that now. That is why I am defined by grief now, because we are all defined by grief. I am not special because of that. And neither are you.

I am more beautiful, though, because of Lucia. More beautiful because grief debilitated me until I grew into the shape of grief and into the shape of love. I am sideways and ugly and in that way, I suppose I am beautiful.

For we're creatures of the wind and wild is the wind.

What ways has grief shaped you? What parts of you feel leafless and empty? What parts of you are heartier? What ways have you grown more beautiful because of your grief? In what ways have you thrived? In what ways have you merely survived?

after the fire

photo by bsteele.

When he asked me to help him clean after the fire, I didn’t know what to expect, but I agreed. I grabbed a headlamp, some throwaway clothes, my combat boots. Of course, I agreed. It was my stepfather's ancestral home. And everything was gone.

He told me the story in the morning. His mother and father in their eighties watched from the street as the fire ravaged their home. My stepfather cried when he told me that detail, and I could see them in my mind's eye watching their house engulfed. It is a particular kind of hell to watch a tragedy and not be able to do anything. People asked what caused the fire, and they just didn't know. Fire is random and cruel sometimes. It was this time.

Generations of his family lived in the house, which once served as the General Store and first Post Office in this area of the Poconos. When they closed the door to business, it was the late sixties. And they literally just shut the door, left the shelves stocked, the cash register in its place, the butcher and bakery cases empty but for the metal trays. Unclaimed and undelivered envelopes rested in the postal cubbies. Through the years, they used the space for storage, and so boxes of antiques, china, clothes, magazines, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of family heirlooms and antiques were stacked around the aisles of the store. One day, they were going to go through it. One day, maybe they would even open again. One day, until it was thirty years later and it was gone in one night. Poof. The caveat repeated by everyone from the police officer to my mother to the neighbors, but everyone is okay. Everyone is okay.

Noone looked okay.

They looked like charcoal outlines of themselves, standing devastated in front of what was once the heart of the family. The house where my stepfather grew up, the place where he had Thanksgiving and birthdays, and where he visited his aging parents was half standing, naked, open to the world. His eyes filled with tears as we pulled up. "I have been here every day since the fire, and it still shocks me when I see it." Strange as it seems, I had never been to the house. I was an adult when my stepfather married my mother, and his elderly parents came to our house for holidays. I could see the majesty and beauty of the old stone house in the same moment I could see its ravaged barebones.

I should have gone before. I should have helped him clean it out before the fire. But how would I have known?

Miners lights on our heads, we waded into the blackness. Even with the front door wide open, the charred remains of the room sucked the sunlight into the walls. It was oppressively dark. My eyes adjusted, then sought the comfort of not processing anything, then refocused. I hadn't met Sam yet, or had any of my children, but I missed them. I missed a family in whose health I could feel comforted by in the wake of fire. I missed someone to miss. I felt the swirling chaos of a disaster, the meaninglessness of it all, the loneliness and fragility of my humanness. One day, many years from that moment, I would feel that way again times a thousand.

The gravity and devastation of the fire didn't hit me until I was knee-deep in the soggy aftermath of things that belonged to people. A blackened Stickley chair. A box of wet Life Magazines. A cash register from the 30s. My headlamp rested on a shelf lined with full boxes of untouched Jello packages from the 1960s. Perfectly intact. No soot. No smoke damage. No water damage. Just Jello. The shelf underneath filled with unrecognizable black lumps of nothing. The gelatin spared and a box of letters written during World War II gone. So random. So very cruel.

We pulled the things one by one out into yard, so we could photograph each item. It would take weeks to do the entire house. My stepfather teared up here and there. He cried right and proper when he found a box of childhood toys, trucks melted into the box bottom. A toy he made his nephew when the boy was just two. He remembered the lost things after they were charred and unusable. Like finding them and losing them in the same moment.

I know that feeling now.

My step father pulled out old butcher trays. “You want these, Ang? They’ll clean up. What about this cast iron cauldron?”

“Sure, I’ll take it.” I took everything offered. I scrubbed pots and old antique toys for weeks. I don’t know if I wanted it or anything really, but a pie plate out of context seemed curious, exotic, foreign, important, even. I lived a single life in a two bedroom apartment in the city. I didn't need these things, but I just didn’t want everything to be lying out in the front yard, bit by bit.  A life dissected and eviscerated in front of God and everyone, catalogued for a faceless entity on the other end of an insurance policy. How much is a broken play horse played with by you, your father, and your grandfather worth? Later, we threw the unsalvageable things into a rented dumpster. That brought a kind of oppressive sadness on my chest and shoulders. There it is. There it was. You cannot save everything that is broken.

The smoke smell radiated off me, out of my hair, for days after. I kept remembering standing in the absolute black of the General Store, staring out to the street, the front door open. I watched a butterfly dance through the door and into the rubble. The juxtaposition of it haunting and beautiful. I wanted to call out to my stepfather, a bird and butterfly watcher, but it seemed sacrilegious.  I just stopped and watched it quietly flit around the edges of the room and explore for a few seconds before it turned and flew into the light again.

There is nothing here for me, the butterfly says, but everyone is going to be okay.

+++

I had my own kind of fire. Everything about me was destroyed when she died. I felt all of these things again, except it was me consumed by fire, tornado, war, devastation, death. My charred backrooms left open to nature and the neighbors.  After the fire, some shelves in me were left unscathed. After the fire, I pulled everything out of me one by one to catalogue all my losses. After the fire, some boxes contained full sets of antique china that you could save if you scrubbed them clean of the soot with the perfect amount of delicacy and toughness. After the fire, when it looks like everything is gone, you find a box of expired Jello and a butterfly flits past your miner's light and you think, "Everyone is going to be okay."

When she died, I touched those times where I came face to face with random chaos all over again. I realized those moments reminded me of losing my daughter, not the other way around. I am learning to lay all of me out in the front yard, take pictures, and save what I can. I am learning how to discern what is salvageable inside me. I am learning to figure out what I must throw into a dumpster.  I am learning.

What experiences did you have before your loss that you are seeing with a different perspective? What experiences are you processing now through the lens of loss? What have you learned to salvage after your loss? What things are you throwing out after your loss?

drunk

photo by ldandersen.

I pull the darkness up to my chin, and curl my knees up under her. The alcohol is a nice way to turn off the refrain. My eyes force themselves closed in spite of the insomnia that has plagued me all my life. I am a lump of unconscious. No dreams. No waking. No dead daughter. Just the mind switched off.  

In my most raw moments, in the early days after Lucy died, I made some very lucid decisions. One was to not drink for a few weeks. I thought booze would tear me open, dump my necrotic organs onto the floor in front of me. Liquor will only make me cry more, I reckoned. It might even make me suicidal. Maybe I will scare my daughter when I am drunk and full of grief, guilt and self-hatred. Maybe there was a demon in the bottle which would possess me and make me more sad than I could possibly imagine. I would be swallowed whole by bourbon, that is what I thought.

The alcohol would not have made it to my brain, I suspect now. It would have kept working on the large, pulsating hole right through the center of my abdomen. It would have been covering it over and over, dulling it slightly, but never leaving it alone. And I probably wouldn't have noticed the drunk.  Still, there was a healthy fear of the unknown--grief drinking seemed dangerous to me.

I started drinking again because I figured it couldn't hurt anymore. I was nigh-suicidal, my organs were on the floor anyway, and it ached more than I could imagine. The wine slipped over me, like an old comfortable lover who knew just where to kiss me every time. I felt normal, like a normal person, not a grieving mother. Just a person enjoying a glass or five of wine with some dinner. Drinking has always been a kind companion for me, not something that drove me into a depression or into psychosis, rather like an old friend, a confessor, listening to my self-pitying ramblings over a glass. We would laugh, sometimes cry. I felt better just having the booze near me.

A glass turned into a bottle. And when it took over my nights, I stopped, because I wanted to get pregnant. And then I was pregnant and absolutely did not drink. But every day I thought, "This pregnancy might be fucking manageable if I could have a bourbon." I would mention nearly every time I was at my midwife. "I could really use a bourbon, Pam." And she would laugh, and I would look at her. "No, I'm serious."

A pregnant dry drunk may be the curse Dionysus unleashes upon humanity. I was a miserable, unpleasant person to be around or know. I embodied anxiety and misplaced anger. I was not the pregnant person that people would approach, hands outstretched headed towards my expanding belly, with the question, "Is this your first?" No, I would stare at people with a thousand dagger stare, "Touch me and I cut you, bitch."

Then Thomas Harry was born. Whew, glad I was done with all that nastiness. I was out of the woods. Everything was happy. Here is a new cute, adorable baby who doesn't cry very much and sleeps great. My life felt pretty complete. My grief, while not absent, felt under control.

"Let's toast," I said. "Let's toast to our good fortune."

I felt like my grief was under control. I felt like my drinking was in my control. And now, I am trying to get sober.

+++

People drink for many reasons. I drank because my kid died and I deserved a fucking drink. I drank because I couldn't sleep. I drank because I like the taste of wine and bourbon and beer and vodka and any other drink with a proof level. I drank because I was sad. I drank because I was happy. I realized, not that long ago, that I really only drink for one reason--because I am an alcoholic.

Drinking problems are usually measured in quantities and horror stories. I know that there is a blackout-drunk-lose-everything bottom for a lot of people.

I am not that person.

I have children. I have a husband I love. I have a life I love. I have lost nothing material. What I lost was any respect I had for myself. I lost peace. I lost contentedness. I lost feeling well. I lost restfulness. I lost hope. I raised my bottom up to a place that was low enough for me. As a mother, I often relegated those things to some day. Some day, I will sleep. Some day, I will take care of my drinking. Some day, I will be happy.

My husband didn't even realize that I drank at night after the kids went to sleep. I have never driven drunk. I have never missed a bill, or woken up to a drink. My kids have never seen me drunk. When I drink, I write.

I shut the door of my office and fall into a world of 75 words per minute. I edit. I paint. I create an alternate reality where Grief and Bourbon are my muses. But I was still miserable. After waking in the morning, cotton mouth, cloudy with a dull headache, I vowed not to drink that night. By 8 pm, I was talking myself into one glass of wine. Just one glass. After one glass of wine, or one bourbon, or one beer, all bets were off. My resolve was gone. I maybe had two more, or four more, or maybe more. I called a hotline one day.

 "I don't know if I have a problem."

"Did you answer the questions on our website?"

"Yes. I think I got an A."

"Ha, yes, I got an A too."

"I used to drink more when I was single. I haven't even been drinking for more than three months. I am not anywhere close to a rock bottom," I tell the woman on the phone.

"You are at enough of a bottom to think you have a problem. And besides, bottoms always have trap doors," she says to me.

"But I don't drink very much on the average, and I am very good at quitting. I am just not any good at staying sober."

"But staying sober is the important part to you, right?"

"Yeah."

"How do you feel when you drink?"

"Ashamed. Pathetic. Weak."

"Pay attention to that."

+++

It has been a seventy days without a drink. I am happier than I have been in years. With Lucy in my belly, I remember saying that I wouldn't drink after she was born. I didn't realize I was a drunk, then, but my brain made some feeble connection that when I drank, I felt bad about myself. Then she died. And stopping drinking was the last thing I thought would help me.

Someone told me recently that Lucy's gift to our family was my sobriety and that I would never have gotten sober if she had lived. That is true. Drinking after Lucy's death immediately was not fun. It was like medication to keep me normal. Or rather the social lubricant I needed to be alone with me.

I thought I was smarter than being an alcoholic. I thought I could outsmart my family's legacy of booze and drunks. What I learned is that the arrogance of thinking that way prevented me from getting healthy. My arrogance prevented me from calling people at my most desperate hour to say, "I need a friend to talk to. I need a friend because my daughter died. I need a friend because I think I am drinking too much." It seemed easier to get drunk, and in fact, it was easier to get drunk, but it wasn't healthier or smarter.

Alcoholism is a progressive, fatal disease. When I began drinking, after my one year old son was born, I didn't immediately drink to drunk. In fact, the last few months of my active drinking, I can't remember feeling drunk ever, even when I would stare at the evidence of having drunk a bottle of wine. I would stare at the empty bottles of liquor clogging my recycling bin, and think, "Next week, this will be filled with Pellegrino bottles. Next week." But it never was. Drinking felt like a choice. It felt like I was handling the bourbon, except that when I tried to quit, I would drink again. I was sober for two days, I would reward myself with twice as much Maker's Mark on the rocks, and drink myself tired again. I didn't know, until I began reading about alcoholism, that this is a pattern for alcoholism.

Despite the fact that I am strong-willed enough to make outrageous goals and challenges (riding one hundred mile bike rides, writing a novel in a month, or posting a piece of art every day on a website) and meet them, I thought drinking was a weakness of mine, and that I was simply a weak-willed person. Looking at alcoholism as a disease has helped me be more compassionate. The moral defect here is simply not seeking help earlier. Some people describe alcoholism as an allergy to alcohol, because alcohol in an alcoholic creates a series of undeniable reactions--I can't say no to another drink once I have had one. If you ate a strawberry and your throat closed, you would not call yourself weak for your bodily reaction. What I have control over is whether or not I eat the strawberry at all.

I used to think that for me quitting drinking was like someone telling me to lose weight by cutting off my left leg. I mean, sure I would lose weight without the leg, but everything would else would be near impossible. I always wanted to be spiritually/mentally/physically well AND have drinking. That is simply not possible for me. And these days of sobriety, I also had to seriously think about why I would look at drinking as my left leg.

Right now, I feel like all the skin has been peeled from my body. I feel as raw as the early days after Lucy's death. And I am scared as hell. It's not that I can't do this, it's that I can.  And now I have to feel the weight of Lucy's death and of my losses without numbing it with alcohol. I am wrestling with losing my medication, my best friend, my confidante, my muse, my partner, my inspiration, my wubby, my safety net, my identity, and my number one enemy. But one thing is absolutely clear, the shame of drinking, the self-abuse I engaged in over every drop of alcohol I took in, that feels lifted. I feel a freedom and a lightness in this place of absolute vulnerability, and that is addictive too.

Due to the nature of this post, please feel free to utilize posting anonymously. What is your relationship with drinking like? Have you sought to numb your grief with alcohol or drugs? Have your habits gotten worse or better since your loss?



Hug Thyself

The other day in the car my preset was broadcasting a program which I sometimes find interesting, but this week according to the  host was about "loving yourself."  And woah, for me that screams touchy feely and sounds as enticing as root canal.  So I found some angry music to hum to instead, but on the way home grew weary of heavy bass lines and forgot about the lurve fest and clicked back through just as the host was asking the guest to explain the difference between self-pity and self-compassion.  She paused, had to figure out which definition to chew through first, landed on self-compassion, and finally blurted out something to the effect of:

Look, everyone hurts.  Everyone experiences hurt.  Everyone suffers.

(I'm paraphrasing pretty heavily, but some of these catch phrases are not mine.)

The words flitted out while my fingers twitched on the dial.  Self compassion respects a common humanity, and the idea that life is difficult for everyone . . .  It's not self-focused, it assumes we're interconnected. . .  Suffering is part of the human experience, this IS normal, everyone experiences suffering.

Ultimately this should feel better than self pity because it means we're not alone.

Huh.

I don't toe that line very often anymore, the pity party one, with the self-absorbed balloons and memememe cupcakes (hey, I'll cry if I want to), but if I get close it usually doesn't take much to pull me back far away from the line with a sharp slap to the face.

It's all but impossible to stay wrapped in my bitter cocoon during a week like this, with a disaster of one sort, followed quickly by one of another, followed immediately by yet a third uncontemplated -- all upon one population.  It makes me realize how lowly and small my place is, and how contained my problems.  The losses there are so massive as to be unbelievable, unfathomable.  How the earth could move and then the sea could rise and make so many disappear within minutes is the stuff of fiction and space ships, not here, not on earth, where we watch television and twitter and eat chocolate and drive to the grocery store listening to the radio chatter about giving yourself hugs.

Sometimes it's hard to watch this hurt, to listen to people talk about how within minutes life changed forever.  I realize I told a similar story once, but now I feel nothing but sympathy:  that control I thought I lost?  I had both hands on the wheel compared to this, not to mention afterwards I got to retreat to my nice warm home while they're talking from a tent without water or food or family.  With the threat of nuclear meltdown to boot.  I wonder if what I felt was really pain at all.

When I hear of a new babyloss blog I try and find the time to go and leave a comment, and 99 times out of 100 I say, "You're not alone."  It's not much, but I hope the message conveys.  I remember feeling so bereft, so completely alone, as if I was the only person living on earth to ever undergo the freakiest of freakshows that ever freaked.  But here this lady is saying what I now know to be true:  not freaky at all, not remotely.  If Japan had a blog, this week I'd say, "You're not alone."  None of us are.  I just hope they hear me and know how sincerely I mean it.

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Writers use simile, it's a fact of life like taxes and death.  And when writers are trying to describe something that's happened to them, but not to many others -- like say, the death of an infant -- that hurt like a motherfucker and changed their universe in the blink of an eye, they grasp at any metaphor, any simile, any analogy to try and explain their pain.  I know I'm guilty, I've compared Maddy dying to a car wreck, I've discussed being stabbed in the heart, I've described the earth shifting under my feet, I'm sure I've even spoken of feeling flooded or even waves.  Tidal waves.

And this week I feel like an idiot because it's abundantly clear just looking at the headlines that I know nothing of feeling the earth move or the rush of a wave as high as a building crashing over my head.

Perhaps I shouldn't make comparisons to things I don't know about; losing Maddy was like hell I write, but I know nothing of that other than what I picked up in Inferno. (Although, if it does exist, I am headed there.  And will let you know as soon as I adjust to the lighting.  Call me!)  Am I doing a disservice to excrement saying I felt like shit?  I do know that I will pause before I speak of the auto accidents and volcanic ash and post traumatic stress disorder because maybe . . .  maybe it wasn't like that at all.  

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The other thing the guest lady on this radio program said before I moved on down the dial for something more uptempo was that in order to even begin to understand something like what happened in Japan, you need to be compassionate with yourself.  You need to acknowledge that it will hurt, that it's difficult to read about and adjust to, be kind to yourself as you abide with other's pain.  And I wondered, as I clicked away, about all the people who failed to even attempt to understand us:  who just moved on, and ignored it, and forgot it, and refused to talk about it.  The people who thought they were insulating themselves against our deadbaby juju by stepping a good ten feet away and using hand sanitizer.  The people who thought our lives were "too negative!" and they were doing them-positivity-selves a favor by not reaching out into the morass.  

But maybe this woman is right, and these people couldn't muster up enough kindness for themselves to open the door to someone else's hurt.  I'm not sure I have enough self-compassion to feel sorry for them, but it did make me think about them, even for just a few minutes.  I realized we aren't the pity parties, they are.  They're the self-absorbed ones, who blather on about wallowing and moving on.  We're not the one's who are alone, they are.  We're the normal, the ones with suffering, they're in denial.  The people who can sit and be with us and our pain?  Are truly good to themselves and understand compassion and its interconnectedness -- probably to such an extent that it's interwoven and unconscious.  I should probably strive to be one of these people.  I owe them so much.

It also means, if this radio chick is right, that by reaching out to others in our situation, by stepping outside of ourselves for even a few minutes online, that we've done this first step of being good to ourselves.    It's funny to think that I may actually be more gentle on myself after my baby died; here I gained a ton of weight I couldn't lose, and now swear uncontrollably and grew more cynical, and bleed bitter out of my eyeballs  . . . . but maybe I did.  Maybe we all did.  Our interconnectedness -- if this radio chick is right -- proves it.

Good for us.  /pats cyber self on back

Do you ever trip over the line into self-pity?  (It's ok, I'm sure I did.)  How do you pull yourself back?  Do you experience self-compassion -- that is, do you feel some connection with others in your suffering?  How about in their suffering? Are you good to yourself?  Or does the whole "be good to you!" conversation give you the heeby jeebies?