Blank stares, crickets and tumbleweeds

Recently a friend of mine posted news announcing her third pregnancy on that social media site I sometimes wonder why I joined.  It was a witty, read-between-the-lines kind of announcement that is commonplace in the land of non-baby loss folk.  It is not announcement any of us who have ever had to make the other, darker kind of pregnancy announcement (The baby died.  I’m not pregnant anymore) are apt to make anymore for a subsequent pregnancy.  With my daughter I did not clue anyone into the fact that I was pregnant until I was about 18 weeks along.  There was no formal announcement I just sort of stopped denying what people already had suspected for awhile.  I waited that long not because I was afraid that she was going to die like her brother, although in fact I was pretty sure that was exactly what was going to happen.  Rather it was because I did not have the emotional capacity to deal with the proclamations of “This time everything is going to be fine,” or “Try not to worry, it isn’t good for the baby,” by well-meaning people.  Turns out I got them anyway so it ended up not really accomplishing anything. 

Had George been born with a healthy heart and not three months early he would roughly be the same age as that of my newly thrice-pregnant friend’s eldest child.  As much as I would love to say that after three years of navigating the world of baby-loss I’ve risen above comparing my life to others I can’t.  It is just not possible for me to look at this friend’s life and not draw comparisons to my own.  She has a three year old doing those things that three-year olds tend to do.  I have a baby; dead for three years, not doing those things three year olds tend to do.  She has a second baby and a third on the way.  I am struggling to get pregnant and stay that way long enough to bring home a second living baby.   I think about her and imagine that my life could have looked very similar to hers if only fate had favored me in the same way it had favored her.  I think about her and envy the relative confidence she likely possess that her current pregnancy will have the same result as her previous two did.  I don’t have any confidence that any future pregnancy I may or may not have will result in a living baby. 

A year ago I was in a place where her announcement wouldn’t have been much more than a tiny blip on my radar.  Back then it was fairly easy to have a conversation about pregnancy without white knuckling through the entire thing.  I had also mostly stopped mentally reprimanding pregnant women for complaining about trivial things like swollen ankles and nighttime trips to the bathroom.  If a friend wanted to tell me about her birth plan I was mostly fine with it.  Sure!  Let's do it!  Let's talk about playlists and birthing balls and the evils of medical intervention.  I was a champion!  I was a fortress! I was a pillar of support!  

Two miscarriages later and I’m not feeling so enthusiastic about being a champion or a fortress or a pillar of support anymore.   All I’ve been able to muster in words of encouragement for my friend on her most recent pregnancy is a simple “congrats” to add to the multitude of other congratulatory responses she’s received.   I wish her the best, I really do, I just don’t want to talk about or otherwise be around it, that’s all.   So should she ever want to talk to me about birth plans and swollen ankles and nighttime trips to the bathroom, for now it’s going to be nothing but blank stares, crickets and tumbleweeds. 

How do you feel about your friends' pregnancies?  Has your opinion about thier pregnancies and/or your comfort level with them changed over time?  Do you feel guilty about the way they make you feel?  Have you been made to feel guilty about the way they make you feel?  

vacation

photo by Garry - www.visionandimagination.com

I walked on the black-sanded beach by myself, waiting to come across a large carcass of a whale or ship, something broken and empty, like me. Here it is, I would think, the perfect metaphor for my grief. I would climb it, I imagined, examine it, and take a piece of it home. "You didn't die in vain," I would whisper. "I will remember you." And in that moment, the inextricable link between all creatures would be known to me. Nothing like that happened.

I had never traveled sad before.

After my daughter's death, I fantasized about moving away to somewhere very warm and beautiful. Life is too short to stick around New Jersey. Or maybe this time, when we didn't have a newborn to care for or money to be spent on her, was just the perfect occasion for us to travel the world for a while. We could leave this terrible place where babies are stillborn and you can't make a left turn. Eight months after my daughter died, we packed up our grief and headed to my mother's country, Panama, for ten days.

Some days, I was ecstatic, begging to travel long distances through the country for the possible glimpse of a sloth, or totally jazzed to hit the fisherman's beach to bargain in Spanish for some fresh catch. I bounced on the balls of my feet, clapping my hands like a motivational speaker. "Come on, people, those monkeys aren't throwing poop at themselves. We've got a jungle to trek." Other days, I could barely muster a walk out of the bedroom. I woke up several times each  night thinking about the dog or my father, wracked with guilt and overwhelming anxiety. Something. Was. Wrong.

The other thoughts in those hours of the night were how far away this country is from my daughter's ashes. Lucy's death seemed so small and long ago, like a dot I saw on the tarmac of Newark as our plane arched toward Central America. Oh, but I packed her death. It ached in my every joint, in every inch of my being. Some days, every activity seemed rather pointless or overwhelming or both. "Meh. I'd rather be sleeping."  And the family would leave as I read books and wept uncontrollably.

And I remained cold. Eight degrees off the equator, I shivered in the sun. I wore a sweater most nights, sometimes during the day. I couldn't get warm. It had been like this since Lucy died, not being able to feel warmth.  I carried a bit of winter solstice in my body now.

+++

I cried during very chaotic turbulence, because what I didn't dare speak before my trip or during, was that I was convinced I was not coming home from Central America. Riptide. Hanta virus. Panamanian drivers. Mud slide. Pool accident. Infected finger. Lightning. Freak machete accident. The ways in which one can die on a vacation are surprisingly varied, interesting and around every corner. I sent emails to all my people, "I will always love you." The pilot actually came on the loud speaker on our return flight to say that we may have to make an "emergency fuel landing." This is it, I thought. I was the one with tears in my eyes and hand raised. "Uh, is that emergency landing because we have no fuel? Or is that a landing to get fuel? Could you just clarify the emergency part?"

Once you are on the shitty end of statistics, that small stretch of number is your homeland where no death scenario is too far-fetched, wild, or out of the realm of possibility. I even imagined different ways to be imprisoned in a Panamanian jail for being at the wrong place at the wrong time during a drive on a desolate piece of highway.  And my living daughter seemed a step away from death too. Sometimes I just cried, not because I saw Beatrice's imminent drowning, but because I wanted Lucy to be in the pool with her sister and her father, bouncing and splashing. I hate seeing Beatrice without her sister. My husband without his daughter. The world without a little giggling girl.

+++

There was part of me that imagined this trip as something healing, something different than it was. I tried not to build it up or imagine it being a vacation from my grief. But I admit part of me felt like maybe a change of scenery would change my grief. Just a respite from the exhausting heavy weight of it. Maybe like Atlas passing the world to Heracles for a brief minute just to stretch the shoulders. How could I not be happy in such a beautiful place? But the pure exhausting nature of grief amplified the ugliness inside me and the beauty of everything else. Lush green and grief. Moss and anxiety. I looked out of our room onto the great expanse of the Pacific Ocean, watching the sun set, and still, I was so fucking sad. It's easier to be sad in New Jersey. You are supposed to be sad in New Jersey. This was just another shitty day in paradise.

+++

When we walked in our house, I walked straight to her urn. Why hadn't I taken it with us? I stared at it for fifteen uninterrupted minutes, I missed home.  I missed her (which had nothing to do with home.) I missed grieving her. Home represented non-judgment. No expectations. Just grief in whatever form it came. And yet the vacation was beautiful, dare I say, worth it. I listened to the story I told to other people about the vacation--epic hikes through the jungle, watching twenty hummingbirds fly around my daughter, lying on the beach, rolling a cigar in a factory with my cousin,  spotting a sloth in the jungle, or discovering a moss-covered wall and waterfall.  Those were amazing moments. The truth is when I spoke of my amazing days before, they have really always been an amazing moment or two enveloped by the mundane. After my daughter died,  they became amazing moments enveloped by the grief. And they are, in their own way, sometimes happier. Maybe the juxtaposition with grief makes them happier.

If someone asked me many years ago to describe how both my best and worst moment could be wrapped up together, I couldn't have imagined what that could possibly be. Then I birthed Lucy, knowing she was dead, both so incredibly tragic and beautiful. Her birth, a peaceful moment of agony. And so this first vacation after her death, an agonized moment of peace.

Have you traveled, or been on holiday, since the death of your baby? What was the experience like? How has grief changed your experience of travel? Or how has travel changed your grief?

After The Bear Hunt

The discussion boards for Glow in the Woods are truly that warm, welcoming campfire to so many of those who find us in the darkest of journeys. Throughout Glow's five years, the boards have grown tremendously. We are so grateful to how graciously our community continues to abide, listen, and support one another. Through our growth and feedback from our community, we felt it was time to expand and add another board--Parenting after Loss. Whether you were parenting children before your loss, or parenting a child born subsequently, Glow felt it was time to create a space to talk about the specific issues around parenting and grief.  We hope this space will be welcoming to those in all stages of grief and parenting. As always, if you have any suggestions or feedback on the community section of Glow in the Woods (the general board or the ttc/pregnancy/birth after loss board or our new board parenting after loss), please contact us here. We'd love to hear your thoughts. 

Today, we are thrilled to introduce Merry of Patches of Puddles as our new Board Moderator and a regular contributor. Merry's support and love permeates all the nooks and crannies of this community.  Merry's fifth child Freddie lived for eleven days in SCBU before dying of pneumonia. She is parenting Freddie's little brother and four older sisters in the UK. We are so lucky to have her keen eye, compassionate heart, and eloquent voice among ours. --Angie

“You can’t go over it, you can’t go under it…Oh no, you have to go through it.”

So say the words of a rhyme my children sing; lines that have played in my head since I stepped upon this grief path. The Bear Hunt; the long, difficult, fearsome journey.

I tried to find a way to scramble over grief, glide upon its surface and slither down over the other side of a glass dome that reached skyward, holding my baby and my pain inside it. I pledged to write him out of my mind and memory, believing I could escape the trite truisms of the steps of grief. With no intention of reaching acceptance, I relished denial. Busy, stretched beyond measure by the damaged children surviving Freddie alongside me, I pushed my tears to the quietest moments, the dead of night, the bathroom, lonely car journeys of the parent taxi trail. In the daylight, fear and pain on the faces of his sisters when I cried was too awful to behold. Keep it together, put on a brave smile, hold them when they cried. Just keep swimming. Just keep gliding.

Just keep scrabbling desperately to hold on to the life that had been ours, when we could count our children without confusion. When we could hold them all in our arms. When there was no space on the sofa, no space in our hearts, no empty spot between us all.

And then came despair. Choking, horrifying, utterly consuming and black as night and twice as bitter, despair. And I tried to go under it. I told the world and all her wives of my lost son, just to see the shock, see the horror, see the recoil from all the checkout women and frightened postmen who wished the crazy lady away. Begone, with your foul, mud soaked, horrifying grief. Get over it. Move on. Be on your way with your inappropriate love for a boy made of ashes. His loss rose up between us all, the husband and girls who went on and relearned a smile and the mother, woman, wife and now barren and broken part-human who tunnelled through days and wondered how to make another life. Month after month, I sunk beneath blood and anger and disbelief as a never birthday loomed and a life mourning a baby stretched impossibly - broken - in front of me.

You can’t go over it.

You can’t go under it.

Oh, no… you have to go through it.

Through the mud. Through the tears. Through the river that takes the feet from under you. Through the grass that sways above your head, disorientating, blocking the view, all you can see. And all the time dragging my broken children along with me, committed to the path I had chosen - the hunt I had wanted - which was punishing them so utterly.

The work and effort of grief, a journey, a slog, all to find a big black cave and a big black bear and turn tail and run for home, retracing steps, trying to find the place where once you were, trying to keep my other children safe as they bumped and scurried alongside.

And then… and then… lying on the bed, chest heaving from the chase, bones exhausted, tears all cried out and heart hammering. A memory of horror and fear and the jawed yaw of utter destruction, of unimaginable pain, right there, in your mind’s eye.

Slipping… sliding away.

A memory.

He was here. One of us. I do remember him. We did love him. I do love him. He was a person and he is – always - my boy. He was also a journey, one that broke me on every step and which brought me home, but not to the same place.

And, having gone through it, I tell you a truth now. Life goes on. Not the same life. Not the same person. Not scarred exactly but somewhat brutally reshaped.

The journey, now part of me, has the air of a badge of honour to it. I would not be without it. Here, in the unasked for afterglow of grief, I find myself, us, a family, with every decision we make infinitesimally altered by the knowledge that one of us can die.

The lens is different. Everything I do is tinted by the grief lens. My girls go out and I hope to see them safely back. The telephone rings and I hope to not hear of death. A baby is born and my head reels that people ask for weight and gender, not first breath safely taken. My child, admitted to hospital, makes it safely home. I am stunned by survival. The car breaks down, expensively. Nobody died. Our livelihood is precarious. Nobody died. The toddler ballpoint pens the expensive sofa. It’s just a thing. Nobody died.

This is my story, 3 years on. Mine is a journey complicated by my travelling companions; the living children I brought with me, guilt that they know grief, regret that they see fear in my face when illness strikes, sadness that they fumble answers to simple questions about brothers and sisters. Nothing has been the same for them since Freddie died. They do not have the same mother, or father, or family. Everything is a fight to weigh the knowledge of loss against the right to independence. They trod the terror of the subsequent baby path with us and their life is changed because of that.  And his life, the precious princeling who came after, is a kaleidoscope of the fragments of loss, love, longing and fear and joy and wonder that he has as yet no knowledge of and cannot change.

I am not the mother I was. I am twice the mother and half the mother, a patchwork of unwanted experience. I am surviving the hunt and the fear, but I will never be home, not quite.

Where are you on your grief journey? Have you tried to move under it? Over it? Tell us what it is like to move through it.

Not Gonna Panic (Part 1)

Something happened to me, physically, in the wake of holding my dead daughter, Roxy. I felt it happen that day, walking from the room where she was born back to our private hospital room where our family waited, wailing. See, one of the perks of having your baby die is that you get your own private room for a few days. They mark the door with a purple flower, which I assume is to warn nurses not to be cheery and congratulatory. I have wanted to stomp the life out of every purple flower since.

Where was I? Oh yes, the hallway walk. It may have been 20 feet, but in my memory it’s 3 football fields. I remember every zombie step, knowing that there was more horror fighting to get into me than could fit, so my veins felt crowded and noisy with electric, terrible blood. A time-release panic valve was installing itself, and I could feel it. A panic payment plan was set up inside of me. I think I know now, 5 plus years later, that I will not live long enough to pay the debt.

I fell through that day without completely dying of it, but I was different. Not just emotionally. Not just psychologically. I was different, physically. I started having panic attacks within the week. I assumed I was having heart attacks. I was certain I was dying. I went to the ER. I went to the clinic. I went through a battery of tests, wore a heart monitor for a month, etc. “No,” the doctor said, “your heart is fine. It may be post traumatic stress.” I’ve been on anti-anxiety meds for half a decade now. The panic attacks are fewer, but they still come. They can be triggered by adrenaline of any kind (roller coasters, sick kids, playing basketball, etc.) I’m a lifer, most likely. This song is about having one of these attacks. It is the self-talk. It is the darting, random thoughts as I try to keep it together long enough to escape my place of work before I collapse.

Whatever is wrong with you goes all the way
Through your awful last name in the dark
I wonder where that dog will run to?
I wonder how long that dog will run?
You can keep your hand to your chest
You can worship by the elevator, leaving
Calm down
Beating beating beating beating
A mannequin in a dress, an overpass
I hope I never get used to losing you
The sound of a car on a bridge
And the things you can’t take back
No matter how long you live
Calm down
Beating beating beating beating
I’m not gonna panic
I’m not gonna panic
I’m not gonna panic

Since your loss, does anxiety overwhelm you? How do you handle it?

This time, again

Those five weeks between when we found out he was sick and when he died exist outside of time.  They accordion out behind me as one infinitely long moment and then compress back to simply Before George and After George, the contents reduced to the width of a single piece of paper.  I alternate between being surrounded by memories, smells, tastes which bring me back to those weeks and real disbelief that The Horrible Thing actually happened at all.  

The more time that passes the more I seem to have difficulty grasping the core of what his death has really meant.  I tell myself that I can't regret what happened in the past because my present is filled with love for my daughter, who in a very honest sense only exists because her brother doesn't.  I fortify myself against the reality of his death rationalization by rationalization.   I am a master at trying to soften the edges of his death.

Then March comes around the corner, always unexpectedly, to knock the breath out of me.  The ether of emotions that normally fog my brain crystalize and it is all suddenly so simple again.  I gave birth to a baby in the cold sterility of a surgical suite.  I held his small sick and dying body, kissed his head, whispering to him I loved him and that I wished he could stay.  Then I simply waited for his tired heart to stop its battle to keep beating.  In March I can distill all the regrets and justifications and apologetics that I conjure up during the other eleven months of the year into a simple elixer of love and heartbreak.  

I am a mother to two children.  One who lives and thrives: a marvel in front of my eyes.  The other dead and gone: a shadow in the periphery of my vision.  But for a few weeks in March, when the world around me is waking up from its wintry slumber, that shadow feels a bit more substantive.  Almost as if I can reach out and hold him again, kiss his head, whisper him I love him, and that I wish he could have stayed.  

 

Do you rationalize the death of your baby to ease your pain?  When the anniversary of the death of your child approaches does it change your perspective on the past or make you feel closer to the one you lost?  How do you feel (or think you will feel) about milestones or anniversaries?  Are they intensely personal events or do you feel the need to share those important dates with people in your life?

quietly forward

I don't want to share her anymore.

Initials traced on sidewalks, birth date carved into wood.

MARGOT WAS HERE, inked on my forehead.

Dropping her name like rain, sprinkled over the city, in grocery stores and preschool and dinners with acquaintances.

Neighbors. Bartender. Old friends.

I have another daughter, I'd lament, with downward eyes, searching for a remedy.

It was like this in the beginning. Shouting, screaming, knees in the mud, heart on my sleeve, anything to feel some sort of connection to her.

For months and a year and more months, I wore her story around me like a cloak, heavy and tattered from the daily grind, dark material, drenched in sadness and anxiety. I didn't care how messy it all appeared. There was no choice to put on the cloak, or to share her, to sprinkle her around the city. Grief doesn't give you a choice. I woke up to life without her every day and that reality felt like all there was.

Somewhere along the ticker I’ve gone quiet. The pulse of my sorrow still beats, steadily, methodically, but sharing her so freely feels uncomfortable now, like it’s a violation of our intimacy.  

Shhhhhhh Daddy, I imagine her whispering, they don't need to know.

Suddenly I’m overcome with this urge for privacy, for things left unsaid, for the cloak to whither and fall, for the sidewalks to wash away, for the wood to rot. I want her all to myself. I want the ways she has changed me to be something that I alone know the extent of. I want my thoughts about her kept only for us, sacred secrets between a father and daughter. I want her ashes, the rocks from her river, the remnants from her brief existence to be tucked away, hidden from bystanders, hallowed ground reserved only for a few.

It’s now in the quiet where I find closeness with her, in the whisper of her name, in the privacy of my own thoughts, in the ways in which she has changed me.

Do you ever feel quiet? Do you feel like not sharing your children so much? If so, what brought that on for you? I wonder if some of you might feel somewhat off by the idea of being quiet, of not sharing your chlldren so freely?