fortune tellers

I root for each fortune teller I meet.

Say her name. Lucy. Lucia. Say it. Mention her.

photo by ManWithAToyCamera.

I am like a magpie, and their blinking neon sign the shiny thing I must peck. I am drawn to the gypsy caravan, the crystal ball, the smell of sage and incense, the Zoltar machine, and aura of pure indigo. Each one talks about my failing writing career and my husband, artwork and my marriage, how I myself am psychic, and destined to be a reader myself. Nothing about the daughter that died.

Channel her. Speak her words, share (what must be) her stilted, strange wisdom of never having breathed, yet so grieved. Channel her.

The five buck psychic asks me for a question, and I tell her about Lucia. How she died in me, and how my husband wants another baby, and I am scared this baby will die too. Right before he is born. (This was eight months out from her death, but it feels like today.) I wanted to know why she died. Science failed me. There is no physical reason my daughter died, but surely, there is a metaphysical one. I found the five buck psychic on-line. She sends me her reading four days later. She tells me that Lucia is a Buddha and that she chose me for her last life, so she could heal old wounds, the ones that need the comfort and unconditional love of a womb experience. And she knew that I would be strong enough to handle her death. It was the soul contract we made. I read her email aloud on the way to the airport. We were flying to Panama for a week, taking our grief on vacation.

"Do you find that comforting?" I asked my husband. Unsure if I should be offended or reassured.

"Yes. It is comforting." We were comforted for the rest of the day. The next day, we ceased being comforted and were back to relentless discomfort of baby-death, grief, angst, fear, anxiety, and bitterness.

Still, I find that idea most comforting of all the ideas posited by the religions of the world--that my baby is a holy woman, a wise soul, an awakened being, a Buddha. Her soul released from suffering. That I gave her unconditional love, that she choose this life because I was strong and loving and earth mother-y. Further, I found the idea that I choose this life comforting. Of course, it arrogantly supports the vision I have of myself as capable, loving, selfless, in control, powerful, rather than the truth of it which is that I am chaotic, frightened, humbled, mediocre, out of control, powerless. I found out later that this idea is a Hindu understanding of stillbirth, that the baby who chooses to be stillborn is in their last life before achieving moksha, before being released from the samsara, the cycle of life, death, and rebirth.

Still, that first psychic gifted me with a moment of solace. It wasn't enough, though, I wanted to hear about her from her. I wanted to hear her voice. And so I began my hero's journey through the metaphysical world. In the last three years, I have consulted psychics, tarot readers, astrologers, fortune tellers, palmists, hair readers, angel channels, auric interpreters, shamans and medicine women every few months hoping for a message from my daughter.  And not one of them, until two weekends ago, mentioned my daughter without my prompting. She is gone. Her energy doesn't reside in mine. But I still rooted for them. I thought hard as they pulled cards, sat still in meditation.

All of my writing, my artwork, my entire life changed after I pushed her dead six pound body out of my vagina, surely you can see this on my soul, in my aura. It must be etched in gold, or charred and blackened in the parts of me that once shone. Surely, you must feel it when you touch my hair, look into my palm, read the tea leaves. I can see it, even the cheesemonger can see it when I ask for a pound of provolone. Just say her name. I believe you can.

I watch these psychic shows when no one is around. They are my guilty pleasure. The one with the lady with long fingernails, talking like a mobster. She channels stillborn children here and there, and despite myself I weep, blubber almost. I watch her in the middle of the night, on-demand, so no one can see me almost blubbering. It is babylost porn. She tells the grieving mothers mundane things mostly, confirmation that their children are around them. I just want that. A confirmation of something--that she lived, that she died, that we grieve, that she is a person with a soul, or rather perhaps that I am.

+++

We wear headphones and microphones. It is the Mind-Body Expo and we are nestled on the second floor on the football stadium, tucked in the corner next to the Tibetan arts table. Here there are psychics and soul artists, channels and astral journeyman, reiki masters and healers in modalities I have never heard of, tables of jewelry purporting to open your third eye or connect you to the Akashic records. My sister signs up to see a shaman women. She is barefoot and beats a drum. I waited for the "World Renown Psychic Medium," as her sign states. I read laminated newspaper articles on her table while I waited. She found many missing persons. Well, three.

I have a missing person.

She whispers, "Can you hear me?"

"Yes." My own voice startles me. She tells me about her process and that she will be talking fast. I get a chill and she begins. She tells me that my grandparents are stepping forward.

She holds my hands in her own, and says, "Your grandfather is here. He is holding up two fingers, then a third. Do you have two or three children?"

 I gulp.

"I have two living children, and a child that died."

"Okay. I see you have two in spirit. The miscarried one is a boy. He said he liked the name Michael." That is the only name on our boy list during this last pregnancy so convinced I was that the growing dot in me was a girl. Michael is my grandfather's name. The hairs are standing up on my neck, and in my gut, I know that is true now.

"Your daughter will be reincarnated as your oldest daughter's first child, and your son will be your second grandchild. They will be part of your family again. They have always been part of your family."

The tears fall unself-consciously. I want this all to be true. I want Lucia to be a Buddha, while simultaneously and selfishly, I want her to come back.  I want to hold her again, some day, even as an old woman. I want to bathe her, and feed her rice and beans. It wasn't her voice, but it was the hope that I may see her again. And maybe that was enough.

Tell me about your experience. Have you consulted a psychic, channel, medium, palm reader, tarot reader, or other metaphysical worker for insight into your grief? What were you told? Was it comforting or disconcerting? If not, have you considered it? What holds you back?

lost and found

Cleaning out the basement was like finding a long spiraling staircase into our family, winding and intricate, exhausting and dizzying.

photo by bourget_82.

"Today is Finder's Day," my daughter tells me as she plays with a baby toy she once adored. "The day we find things." We found a box of hand-me-down big boy clothes for Thor that we tucked away for when he was big--3T-4T. He fits into them now. It is good luck, I am informed as the children tug at me, showing me a wheat penny underfoot. I found clothing from my single working life. Six power suits ranging in sizes from Size 4 to Size 12, plus three additional maternity suits. T-shirts that went to New Zealand, Puerto Rico, California, Italy, New Jersey, across the border into Mexico to buy tequila on the cheap. I found my favorite jeans. Ever. My hoodies for cycling. That perfect skirt from Anthropologie with feather fabric. I found all the little shoes, some worn only twice, before Beezus grew out of them. We made a pile of baby stuff--high chairs and cribs and beds that are not quite adult-sized. We are done now with miniature things.

There were boxes of Christmas ornaments bought at the drug store on Christmas eve, made of cheap glass and glitter. Photographs of my parents married and remarkably young, one of my ex-husband and one of me--thin, drinking bourbon, and not wearing a bra. I found parts of myself lost through the years of grief -- the single person, the happy person, the moderate drinker, the tortured corporate lackey, the caregiver, the auntie, the non-grieving mother. I'd forgotten about those people. I searched their faces looking for something that might explain why my baby died and how I became this person.

I was stoic about the process, then grateful for it. Afterward, almost excited at all the space we now had in our basement and in our heads. As I dug through clothes, piles of boxes, I realized how this stuff kept me simultaneously in the past and in the future, but not anywhere close to the present. I kept skinny clothes for a day somewhere down the line where everything would be back to the way it was. It was the same thing with the baby clothes. It was as though we freed ourselves under the weight of next time. I dug through boxes and boxes of little girl clothes marked Beezus Aged Younger Than Now, but still they felt like Lucia's clothing. I saved them for her. I was still waiting for her even up until this miscarriage last month. I saved nothing of Thor's, I admit. I sent all his newborn things to babylost mamas waiting for their next baby to come. But the girl stuff, the stuff meant for Lucia, was put in bins, preserved for the little sister that never came.

Later in the day, I notice a dark stone nestled in moss outside. I bend to pick it up. A caracol shell broken and exposed, its spiral clear and strong. It is exquisite in its brokenness, still filled with something weighty like emptiness. Caracol, I realize, is Spanish. It is a snail shell--slate grey with white and black. The intricacies of its chambers remind me of the sacred spiral. Fibonacci's sequence. The divine ratio. I pocket it.

I had an obsession with drawing the Fibonacci sequence after Lucia died. 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 , 21,...I wanted my kitchen backsplash to be designed in the shape of it-one tile, one tile, two tiles, three tiles, five tiles...the front walkway, the back brick pattern, a tattoo, her name.

If I added each loss, the thousands of losses after her death, with the last, the next, the next, grief expanded in me, cut me up into this spiraled pattern. I was put together in a twisting line of boxes something wholly different than I was, turned around and back again, but something like me. Or more me. Lost and found. I felt expansive, larger inside than out. Emoting the emptiness I felt. Her death erased the color of me, blurred my subtleties into pockets of blackness separated by a thin white delicate casing. I became the curious dark holes in the shell of me, lines curving downward, spiraling into a simple black dot.

Three plus years ago, I packaged my grief into bins for another day, put them in my basement. I kept doing that with each stage of clothing Beezus grew out of, waiting for Lucia to return and wear them. I hid the hope away in the chambers of my shell. They are labeled anger and guilt and regret and resentment. Sometimes they are labeled not giving a shit. They were parts of my grief that feel like vital organs. I couldn't imagine living without them, so I carried them on my back, filling the space around me. Until it broke off my back, nestled into a bed of moss and waited for someone to pick it up.

It is Finder's Day. We go into the backyard and pick all that we find. Squash blossoms and fiddleheads. Bark and dandelion. We soak them in vinegar and salt and sugar, serve the strange found food to the guests. We empty the bins of what we wish we were. The bins of what we used to be. The bins of envy. The bins with more children to fill the hole of the one we lost. We fill thirteen contractor bags of those wishes, give them away for another family to make a home, a large perfectly symmetrical shell of happiness that is broken to us, but perfectly useable to others, nonetheless. It is hopeful even.

Our life feels all new now without those bins. Our home is emptier than we thought it would be, but it is perfect, nonetheless.

What things did you pack away things for your child or children that were never used? Were you able to give it away, or do you hold on to those things? Why or why not? How do you think holding onto these things helps or hurts you? Conversely, what things have you lost and found in your grief journey?

What It Feels Like To Almost Have A Child After Losing A Child

Two weeks from today, on May 7, around 12:30pm in Los Angeles, we are scheduled to meet our third child, a boy, who if anything like his older sisters, will be long and thick and blue eyed and full of hair.

We have a name picked out for him. We have a few things ready for his arrival; an old car seat, some hand me down articles of clothing, an aqua colored swaddle blanket and a scattering of other necessities, like baby soap and a sealed bottle of whiskey. Barring any unforeseen calamity or early entrance, he will come into the world after spending thirty-eight and a half weeks inside his Mother, the same amount of time his sister spent in utero before dying.

Seventy-five weeks of pregnancy has come down to this.

+++

We are dancing more and more these days. My three year old and I run around the house singing wildly off key to the vibrations of Florence + The Machine, cranking the volume during the “loud parts,” as Stella refers to them, and pumping our fists and spinning in circles and group dancing with Momma, which involves an awkward three person and one belly swaying hug.

We have been doing this sort of tribal dance ever since Margot died. It was always a brief respite from the agonizing grief, a tangible way for us to contrast the sadness surrounding Stella’s life with some joy. But something feels different now. As the song ends and we throw ourselves onto the couch in exhaustion, the sadness that once lingered after the dancing is now replaced with anticipation, the light at the end of another long pregnancy tunnel, the hopeful gift of a son, out of the ashes of his sister.

+++

I have been growing a beard since we entered the third trimester because I don’t know what else to do for my son in utero, because it’s the only outward sign of hope I can think of, because the simple act of not shaving feels like something I have control over. It is thick and black and surprisingly vigorous after two months. And it’s mostly awful looking, something my partner says “doesn’t look bad or good.” But it’s there, growing simultaneously with my son, exuding love and hope every time I pick food out of my mustache or my daughter yanks at it in laughter or I itch it at work or gently pull at it while I’m thinking or reading.

+++

Thirteen months and one day ago, as my partner bled and bled with no clots in sight, we were twenty minutes away from a hysterectomy.

Thirty-six and a half weeks ago we got lucky, damn lucky, that the cells of a tiny egg and a tiny sperm entered into a union that has, up to this point, stayed the course. There is gratefulness in abundance.



Mostly though, there is this inescapable feeling like our lives are hanging in the balance, like we’re standing on the edge of a cliff, overlooking a rugged coastline, waiting to be pulled back or kicked off the ledge.

I don’t know how we could go through this again.

I really, really, don’t know how we could go through this again.  

It’s damn near impossible to keep myself from looking over the cliff, from imagining the free fall should this little boy not make it. The fear, which introduced itself early on in the pregnancy, as if on cue, has successfully set up iron gates around my hopeful heart, holding me in a perpetual state of doubt, my gaze nearly fixed on the rocky coastline below. The emergency run to labor and delivery at thirty weeks didn’t help. Nor have the poor non-stress numbers, the abnormal blood work, or the two dozen times we had to get the doppler out to see if he was still alive. The only relief from the fear and worry is that it’s persistence has become commonplace.

And then there is the hope. Hope that this baby will live, and keep living. Hope that I will hold him in my arms and look into his eyes and tell him that he is my favorite boy in all the world. Hope that I will get to introduce my three year old to her live sibling, to see the two of them together, a dream of such vivid beauty I can hardly even think about it.

Hope that in two weeks time, we will pick up what’s left of ourselves, step back from the cliff, turn around and walk back towards home.

___________

If you have had a subsequent pregnancy, what was your experience like? If you haven’t had a subsequent pregnancy, how does it feel to read about other members of the baby loss community who are pregnant? Is it hopeful? Diffiicult?

joy

This post was inspired by an exchange of e-mails with Christy B about her son, Oliver.  All the best lines are hers. Any spelling mistakes, poorly chosen words or clumsy turns of phrase are mine.

'Here ends the joy of my life, and for which I go even mourning to the grave.'

From the diaries of John Evelyn, written on the death of his eldest son, Richard, on the 27th of January 1658. 

I didn't know who John Evelyn was on the 29th of August 2008, the day my eldest daughter died. Yet there he was, striding on ahead of me. Three hundred and fifty years in front, part of this endless procession of weeping parents.

Early September 2008 - I sat on the floor of a hospital corridor. Overwhelmed. Head between my knees, the beating of unanswerable questions bouncing around and around against the walls of my skull. 

How do I get up from this floor? How can I go back to work? Or watch a film? Or smile? How do I come back from this? How can I recover from this? How do I continue to live?

Without her?

Pulsing with the blood around my body, throbbing in my ears with my heartbeat. In strange counterpoint to my unanswerable questions, these statements repeated in an endless loop.

I love her. She died. Ruined. I love her. Ruins.

My own equivalent of John Evelyn's words. Three hundred and fifty years later.

Here ends the joy.

*****

When you arrive here, this place, this Glow in the Woods, someone is waiting to meet you at the door.

On this particular day, it's me. Catherine W. I'm waiting. I have a pot of tea. Cake. I also have red, red wine. Beer. And cold, clear water. Ice. Lemon. Spare slippers. 

I peer out into the dark. I call, "My baby died too." I hope you hear me.

Sometimes I don't know why I'm waiting here. I don't have a great deal to offer you. But I want to help you, so very much. 

I wish that I could, at the very least, provide you with a schedule, a time table, a handbook. Your Baby Died 101. What To Expect When You Didn't Get What You Expected. Crammed full of practical timelines and guidance. Useful facts such as you will start to feel better in approximately x weeks time.  

But we both know the one thing that I want to give you the most. A letter telling you that this has all been a horrible mistake, a bad dream, an administrative error. And those letters are not in my gift. 

I beckon you in. I think I know where you have been walking. In a place with no comfort. Where it is always too warm or too cold. Where food doesn't seem to make you any less hungry, whether you are choking down a few mouthfuls or stuffing it in. Where there is no rest and no sleep. All positions, sitting, standing, lying down, crouching. All equally uncomfortable. All postures give you a crick in the neck and a sore foot. Everywhere aches or is pins and needles. Very nearly everyone suddenly irritates or annoys. Even people you used to love. 

But perhaps I'm wrong? What would I know. Not a great deal in truth. I'm only one person, with one experience to go by. I can tell you what happened to me but it is not my place to tell you what is happening to you. 

You might think to yourself. Her? They sent her, this Catherine W., as a welcoming committee? Hmmm, I'm not sure about this. She's still here? 2008, that was quite a while ago now. 

But no matter how different we may be, we probably have one thing in common. 

"My baby died." I repeat.

photo by Rainer Brockerhoff

And you notice that my muscles don't spasm. Not any more. That I can speak that sentence, 'my baby died,' without my voice breaking. That I am wearing mascara. That my clothes are on the right way round. That I have just showered. That I appear to have slept last night. That I am still breathing in and out. That I may even be able to give you a comforting, knowing smile.

Sit here with us, try to rest, gather your strength. No pretence, no game face, required. We are here, we will abide with you.

I can't remember the first time I bought some new clothes after Georgina died. When I first made a phone call. When I first went out to buy some food. Or watched a film. Went out walking. Laughed. Went to work. Had sex. Plucked my eyebrows. Smiled when the sun shone. Drove my car. Even when I first stumbled here, to this Glow in the Woods.

But I did. Sooner or later. I have done all of these things. Stumbled. Watched. Walked. Laughed. Worked. More than once. Sometimes I liked doing these things, sometimes I hated doing them. Because I hated that they still existed, food, shopping, cars, eyebrows, tweezers, movies, breathing, internet sites. They all continued when my daughter did not.

At times, I didn't want to do them, I didn't want to even start getting involved in normal life again. Because how could I be remembering her properly whilst I was changing gears? Taking my wallet out to pay for groceries? 

And I also can't tell you the first time that I remembered that little baby, that once was mine, and smiled rather than cried. When I saw her, rather than only her absence heavily outlined in red. When I looked at that empty chair and nodded. In acknowledgement of where she might have been. When I looked back and thought to myself, I can't believe that I made it this far. But I did. 

When everything else was burnt away and all that remained was love. 

I can't offer you a map. I can't offer you any guarantees. I can't tell you how to fix this because I don't think that it can be fixed.

I can only tell you that the joy of my life did not end.

The joy I have now is not the joy that I expected. It is not the steady sunshine of watching my daughter grow from a baby into a young woman. 

My joy is a flickering candle, leaping up fierce and brightly. Sometimes it sputters, sometimes it goes out. But it will be lit again, sooner or later.

It is like my ghost daughter, laughing, delighted. Here. Then gone. But I know her still.

My joy. It did not end.

But yet I still go even mourning to my grave.

++++++

How do you feel about joy? Is it still there for you?  Is it the same as it was before or does it have a different quality? Does it flicker like mine? Or is the very thought of experiencing joy currently unimaginable? 

What were the questions and statements that rattled around your mind in the early days and weeks?

Family Assortment

If I had noticed them, standing there, standing by, I would have felt sorry for them. But I only had eyes for my girl. I should have felt sorry because, being my family, they couldn't run away. They couldn't pull that conjuring trick of disappearing for six months, a year. Then coming back with a forced smile and pretending that none of this had ever happened. That there was no other baby. Vanishing her with a slick sleight of hand. A grandchild, a niece. Here and then gone in a puff of smoke.

When I did finally look up, they were still standing there. Three decades of looking to them for succor, for consolation, for aid and I felt as though I had taken a hammer to them, smashed their bones, set a snare or a pit fall trap. "Come with me," I'd whispered in their ears. Luring them towards a place where they could only be hurt. Coaxing them along with me to a place of death and illness with false promises of chubby babies and matching outfits.

Until the day Georgina died I hadn't hit my younger sister for at least two decades. Our days of tussling and hair pulling long behind us. But that day, I felt as though I had delivered a sucker punch to that face, so dear to me. When I handed her the dead body of her niece with such maternal pride, I ripped at her flesh, pinched and pulled and bruised. In one fell swoop, I took all her security, all her potential pleasure and joy in her own pregnancies and babies, all her calm, all her peace and crumpled them up. I only hope that she has managed to smooth them out again and, whilst they will never be as they were, that they are still usable, that they will serve. And I am so sorry, more sorry than I can say. I was supposed to protect her, to show her that this was easy and lovely.  

But she didn't run, she didn't fall silent, she didn't refuse that body, its smallness, its deadness. She didn't flinch or look disgusted. And, if it were possible, that made me even sadder that my daughter had lost her own sister. And she'll likely never have another.

***** 

I sometimes feel that I was the bystander, the observer. As I watched my daughter's twin sister die. Because it is not in my generation that her absence will echo longest. After all, I managed to live nearly thirty years without her. I expected her to carry on living, long after I had died. But her siblings, they could have had a relationship with Georgina that lasted throughout the entire course of their lives, it could have been their longest connection, their most lengthy friendship. And nobody might have known Jessica better than her twin, kindled into being alongside one another, nervous systems and heart forming together. Georgina could have been a confidant, a supporter, a source of worry or trouble, a mortal enemy? I'll never know and Jessica will never know either. With luck I expected to fade out of Georgina's life at the half way point. But Jessica, she lost the potential of a lifelong companion. And sometimes that seems so much worse, so far greater a loss, than my own.

***** 

I have always been easily hurt. When I was a child, my father tried to toughen me up. It didn't work. I am, I have concluded, un-toughen-up-able. I am still what the kind would call sensitive and the unkind, a wuss. When Georgina died I felt as though all of my skin had been flayed off. That there was only the thinnest line of defence between the outside world and my churning, flinching internal organs. A couple of lines of cells perhaps. Not much of a shield. 

And then those words come. Those words. You don't need me to spell them out because you've all heard them already. People have said them to you, about your baby or your babies, about your grief, about how this all makes sense only you can't see it, about how you are too angry or too sad, about how you need to be like this or like that, about your self pity or self-absorption.

Like needles, piercing my onion skin remnants as I tried to clutch them around me, stabbing straight into my guts. When these words come from a nobody, a passerby, the needle jabs in and comes straight out again, a clean strike. But when they come from somebody close, someone you love, the needle can go in and explode. Like a dirty bomb. Spinning out fragments that scratch and remain. Thin pieces of metal that can encourage infection or which linger, healed over but never entirely integrated. Irritating your flesh. 

And I began to understand how family feuds begin, how people can chop those they once loved off like a diseased tree limb, never to be spoken of again, fit only for burning. Some of those words are not easy to forget. Sometimes I question whether, by forgiving them, I have somehow allowed my daughter to be set aside, considered less. Because I am afraid to make a fuss, to call them out, to say "no, you may not speak about her in that way. Do not dare." 

Photo by wwarby

But then I remember. All those other words, the words that wrapped me and my little girls up so tightly. That told me that she mattered. The dead one. The tiny, broken one. That I mattered. That what had happened was sad but that it was not my fault. The hands that held me and washed me and smoothed my hair. That cooked my meals and filled my car up with petrol and made sure that the mortgage got paid. And those binding, wrapping words, those kindly hands, are so much more important to me. 

It doesn't matter that the hurtful and the helpful often came from different individuals, some consistently jabbing at me with exploding needles, others always handing out tea and scones. Because it is easier to deal with being wounded with someone's arm slung around your neck. And, having lost one, I didn't want to lose anyone else, even those wielding pointy needles. Or perhaps I was just too much of a coward to risk making a scene. 

But here's the thing about family, be they the family you call your own by blood or the family that chooses you and that you choose in return, when others run away, they might just stay. If you're lucky. When others are silent, they might continue talking. When I was walking around like an open sore. When there were no right words because the only words I wanted to hear were something along the lines of, "oh this has all been some major administrative error and obviously should never have occurred. Our apologies and please do reclaim your daughter. Just fill in this form." When they had to talk on a subject that was painful and uncomfortable to them for hours and hours because I would not countenance anything else? Well it's inevitable that somebody's feelings are going to get hurt. It's hard to talk about grief and death at length, especially with someone who is as easily jabbed as I am. 

I found this quote on the internet a while ago, my sources tell me it's a Swedish proverb. These words remind me of my family.

'Love me when I least deserve it because that is when I really need it.'

+++++

And your family? Your friends? Did they run? Did they flinch? Did they say the right things? Or the wrong things? Or nothing at all?

If they hurt you, did you manage to resolve it? Did you cut any family members or close friends off entirely? And how do you feel about that now? Regretful, remorseful? Or glad and relieved?

Signs

The conversation happened on an average evening. I wasn’t feeling any which way in particular, wasn’t expecting anything out of the ordinary. It was just a day, in the middle of another long week, towards the end of a complicated year.

I was taking my time wandering around the multiple level Whole Foods, rolling the cart as slowly as I wanted, perusing aisles that I had never entered, enjoying the temporary taste of aloneness that usually doesn’t exist under these conditions. Normally I’m running between wine racks and around food displays, chasing my two year old, who genuinely believes Whole Foods was created for hide and go seek. A simple visit for shampoo and milk can sometimes take more than an hour with her cheeky company. But not tonight.

As the clock ticks towards closing time, I wheel my cart in the direction of the check out lane to pay for my evening of solitary indulgence. An older woman greets me kindly.

Hello, she says.

Hi.

And that was that, as the story goes.

And then this kid appears. This teenager, with scrappy hair and pale skin, just shows up out of nowhere to bag my groceries. He’s wearing a plaid shirt, baggy jeans and a sincere smile. He looks relaxed and eager almost simultaneously. And he smells like the middle class.

Hey man, he asks with measured enthusiasm. How’s it going?

I have learned how to dismiss these conversations with relative ease over the months since my baby died. In the beginning, when the dizzying shock was all there was, I’m not even sure I heard these kind of questions. I can hardly remember a single conversation with anyone in those first few weeks and months, let alone one with a complete stranger in a check out line. But as the months marched on, this kind of common social courtesy began ringing in my ear like a clanging drum. A friendly and casual how’s it going? from a stranger became a jovial sucker punch: HOW’S IT GOING!?!? ARE YOU HAVING AN AWESOME DAY!?!? I wanted to choke on the nicety. So I learned to ignore, or to respond with a muttered answer, or to simply avoid any situation where this kind of question might surface.

But tonight this sprightly chump has me, before I can even think one way or another. I just answer.

I’m good. How are you?

Pretty good man, he says, pretty good.

You’re putting a lot of items to the side, I note with a smile, remembering my own days in the bagging trenches. You trying to get them all in one bag?

Yes, he replies with an innocent grin.

I know that game. My first long term job was bagging groceries. I spent two years of my life playing tetris with food items, trying to find the perfect fit for each paper bag.

Yeah, he says through a chuckle. Cold stuff goes together, fragile stuff on top.

Exactly. The plastic bag people weren’t any fun though. You can’t organize anything in those bags. I guess you don’t have that problem here, eh? I’m surprised you guys even allow paper bags.

He laughs nervously and the checkout woman flashes me a smile, as if we’ve shared a little dig on her company. And there I am, laughing right along with them, like I enjoy these silly little chats.

And then with a hint of pride, as if he’s showing a veteran his immense talent, he hands me one individual paper bag, filled perfectly to the top with my produce and toothpaste and chips and everything else.

The magazine is down the side, he says with eyebrows raised, not wanting me to miss this little packing gem.

Nice one! I add excitedly.


It wasn’t until I walked out to my car that I even realized what had just taken place. Who was that in there, I thought to myself in a state of perplexity. Having conversations, laughing, using exclamation points - was that me? Did I really just say, nice one!? As I recalled the brief interchange, I could hardly believe it was real, as if I was watching someone else going through the motions of every day people.

I’ll tell you something though. The interaction felt like a minor fucking miracle. A brief sign that maybe this grief, which sometimes feels like a two-thousand pound bear sitting on my chest, is evolving, even in the slightest of ways. Because it’s not as if I forgot my baby was still dead in that moment. It’s not like I magically returned to my former self before my daughter died. She was there. My grief was there. As they always are, tucked and folded in to my very fabric. The truth is, we were all there together, having a pointless conversation about groceries. And it felt pretty okay.



How has your grief evolved over the months and years? Were there any signs that tipped you off to this evolution?