playing with fire

Lu had a miscarriage recently.  We were shocked and amazed that she was pregnant, but the glow didn't last. Within days of seeing that second line it became clear this pregnancy would not be continuing.  

I don't know how much more heartache this family can take.  

We are trying for life and siblings and family.  We are striving against time, against history, against death, against memory.  I want Zeph to have a brother, but he already didn't have one before he was born.  I want our family to be a crew, but we are missing our Silas and we don't know if we will ever have more.

I love my two brothers and I loved growing up in our family of five.  It was crazy, beautiful, loving chaos.  It was always an event, every single day.  Somehow my parents spread their deep and abiding love all over our tiny, growing souls.  Despite illness and anger and sadness for my mother's MS, they imparted a profound love for laughter, for friendship, for family and for fun.  I always envisioned having a two or three kids, but that is looking less and less likely and I'm not sure how much harder we should push.  We have Zeph and he is amazing.

Zeph is my pure joy.  Despite poops and crazy baby toddler behaviors and utter two-year-old defiance, I can only see and think and feel how lucky I am that this being is in our life.  He should have an older brother.  I wish he had a younger sibling of any kind at all.  I want all of that, but I am terrified to try.  We are old.  The odds are not in our favor.  We barely handled a miscarriage at 7 weeks.  What happens at 20, at 30, at 40?  We have traveled the dark path of death and I can never go back.  I want to have everything for my son, but I know too much to have any illusions about what can happen.

And lastly, of course, are the 'positive outlook' people that would call me out for not thinking positively and not hoping for the best.  But I just don't give a fuck about any of that anymore.  Haven't for a while. What I think, what I hope for, what I want, it has absolutely no bearing on what biologically happens in my wife's uterus. Some may believe otherwise, and if it helps them that's fantastic but it just doesn't work for me.

I can't go back to the vortex ever again.  I can't touch that deep dark deathness where Silas went.  And yet I will. We all will.  The only path forward is to try everything and to know that only nothing awaits.  My parents will die. People I know and love will die.  But I can't lose another child, not ever again.  So to keep trying is to play with fire, and I know I can't handle the pain if we fail.

The spring is sneaking into the afternoon sun.  The daylight has been saved.  We get to collect a little more of that light late in the day when it's time to walk off work's sour funk and I wandered slowly with my son to the park today.  I didn't hear Silas then.  I didn't think about what Zeph is missing, who should have been leading the way.  I was so fully engaged in the beautiful moments of his experience that I didn't imagine anything else.  

Yet, when we check every month to see if he'll have a sibling I am suddenly pulled back into that terrible world of hope that resolves into failure.  The deep well of sadness that always lives in my heart flows again, to all my limbs and heart and mind, drowning me anew.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Have you suffered subsequent losses after losing your child?  How difficult or easy was it to try to have more children after your loss?  Did both partners share the same outlook or was one more or less adamant, hopeful, afraid, etc?  How does your family compare to the one you grew up in?

The Chill

I love this time of year, right up until the moment
when I feel the chill in the summer eve.

The back of my arms legs neck, the slight scent of decay.

We're bright and beautiful in the summer sun
and then nightfall
and night breeze
and the darkness spreads around me.

We fucked up last year.  We didn't prepare.
Too consumed by the stunning child in our haunted lives
the rage and sadness and death and madness
snuck up, as only memories can do.

Five years without Silas.
A blazing son on his way to his amazing birthday
that instead is merely anniversary.

That first chill of late summer orients my soul.
Distracted by the wild life and breathing love
I suddenly feel exactly like the night we collected the birthing tub.
The indigo evening, the creaking crickets, the harbingers of doom;
they are now his silent calls made mine, made into
the broken sounds of hope stilled, that future killed.

I love this time of year,
but I cannot breathe in the gorgeous evening summer breeze
as my love for Silas falls from my wet, silent eyes,
and I die a little more inside, again,
wanting him quietly, deeply, desperately as dusk settles.
Waiting for his breath I sit still,
chilled to my bones in the sweet summer eve.

~~~~~

Please post a poem or prose rant to your lost child.  My son would have been five years old on Sept. 25, and instead I just get Fall.  What do you get?  What have you found?  What can any of us do about being part of this tribe?

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?

 

Scars of the Heart

Take my heart out and you will see the scar.  From top to bottom, jagged across the middle, the scar is still raw and pink.

But against all odds, my heart is nearly whole.  Lu and I took the time to stitch the other's back together with words and love and patience and time.

Pass by pass, stitch by stitch she sealed and healed my rendered soul, my tattered heart, and helped me learn how to walk and speak and think again.

I thought I was going to die in the days after he did.  I thought we would be demolished by the unfathomable grief and lacerating sadness.

Yet somehow, now, eight years out from the day I married Lu, I can somehow still think that I am lucky to have her in my life.  Lucky that we have our amazing son Zephyr.  Lucky that we found a way to rediscover laughter, to allow light to re-enter our darkened world.  We are lucky to be together despite our terrible loss.

I married her because she was beautiful and sweet, patient and spontaneous, because she was steadfast, honest, brilliant and true.  What I didn't know then is that she was one of the strongest and most determined people I would ever know.  Her strength of will and incredible outlook on life were absolutely pivotal in our ability to stay together and stay in love when everything around us shattered and disintegrated on the day he died.

She healed my heart with her gorgeous, liquid eyes, and I held her tight through terrible days when not one single thing in the world made a speck of sense.

But the scar remains and always will, and if you look closely enough you will see that it is only nearly whole.  There is still and always a space, a void, an endless abyss in the shape of my son Silas.  It looks minuscule from a distance, but don't be fooled.

That fleck of darkness on the surface of my pulsing heart expands wider and wider the closer you get until the obsidian midnight rift is all-encompassing, swallowing the field of vision until we pass within, into the endless shadow of my limitless grief.

I don't want that hole closed.

I don't want to give away the pain of his absence.

I don't want to ever be so healed that I cannot feel him in me, in us, in our sense of the world.

When Silas died I had no idea what it was like to have a son.  I was hurled into a shadow world of counter-factuals, of impossible ignorance.  I thought Silas was going to teach me how to be a dad, but instead I learned how to grieve and not die from it.  With Zephyr so vivid and alive right before my very eyes, everything I was denied is being revealed, but the weight of losing Silas makes me ballistic with fear sometimes.  I panic at the slightest thought of anything happening to Zephyr, ever, for any reason at all.  Yet just as I refused to let grief define and destroy me, so too do I deny the power of fear to stop me from reveling in Zeph's every breath.

Lu is an amazing mom, and I am thrilled to share this life with her.  I cannot believe to this day that I can feel this good, after so many years of terrible sadness.  The strangest part, though, is how that still-present sadness mixes with the happiness I feel when I spend the day with Zeph, or watch him curled up and nursing in Lu's lap, or hearing him shouting "Dada!" when I get home from work.

The echo of his shout is the silence from Silas and the  knowing look in Lu's eyes.  She hears what I don't either.

I love them all fiercely, the two here with me, and the one we can only share in our sewn-up and scarred hearts.  This is our family and it will always be so: drenched in light and love and happiness and shadowed by our loss that we can never fully comprehend.

~~~~~~~~~~~

What do your metaphysical scars look and feel like?  How have you and your partner navigated the treacherous landscape of your life together after losing your child or children?  How do your living children affect the memory of what you have lost?

Her Ashes Will Ride In My Glove Compartment

My second daughter died on our sidewalk. Just a few steps from our front door.

Everything was fine and then it was over.

I walk over that patch of land nearly every single time I leave the house. My firstborn daughter rides her scooter over the spot, back and forth, screaming and hollering as she glides down the path. Our bedroom is in the front of the house, as close to the scene as you can get without being outside. A street lamp shines through our curtains in the darkness, like a beacon, as if it shines to remind me. Crickets hop between grass and concrete and I can hear them chirp, chirp, chirping away, into the evening and throughout the night.

The slab of concrete where she died just sits there idly still, two feet by two feet, day after day, gray and lifeless.

I thought my home would be ruined for me after she died. I thought it would be impossible to spend every day and night in the exact same place where her life abruptly ended. I wondered how I could avoid walking on that stretch of cement, how I could ever step foot on it without wanting to weep, or build a monument, or take a sledgehammer to it.

I wondered if this city would be ruined for me too.

I'm realizing now, after twenty-one months without her, that these places are all I have.

This was the last place she was alive. It was the last place our living bodies came into contact as I hugged her Mother, my belly against her body, a few minutes before it was over.

It's here in my home, here in this city where I've bonded with her through support group and countless conversations with my wife, through experiencing her with our friends and grieving with my living daughter, by watching my subsequent son being born in the exact place his sister died. We may not have brought a living daughter home from the hospital, but we have spent month after month parenting her, connecting with her, here in this place, even in her absence.

+++

In two weeks time, we will be packing up our meager possessions and moving from Los Angeles to Indianapolis, some two thousand miles to the East.

Los Angeles is where she was conceived, on a blistering July night, bedroom windows open. Los Angeles is where she miraculously grew and where we first saw her and where we felt her kick and where we set up her nursery. And Los Angeles is where she died on an overcast Thursday afternoon. It’s where we last held her and where we said goodbye. It’s the place we faced our greatest darkness, the place our friends whispered her name and lavished us with understanding and kindness. It’s where we spread her ashes, where we have spent night after night talking and crying over our lost baby girl. And we’re leaving it all behind.

The sidewalk isn’t coming with us. Neither is the river where we spread her ashes or the home where we mourned her. Our friends, the ones who selflessly trudged with us through the pain, the ones who know as much as you can really know, they aren’t coming either. The street lamp will continue burning brightly and the crickets will keep chirping and we will be long gone from the only place on earth that I really knew her.

And it scares the hell out of me.

How will we make friends with people who don’t know this part of our story? How will we handle a place that shows no sign of her? How will we feel connected to her in a place she’s never been?

+++

The packing list for what we will take in our car includes three things so far:

travel pack n’ play
leo mattress
margot

The only thing I know to do, as I leave my home, is to take her with me. In whatever ways I can, in whatever form, however possible it may be. Her ashes will ride in my glove compartment. The rocks from her river will be in a glass jar on the floor near my feet. Her necklace and ornament and the framed picture of water will be carefully packed, safe and sound in the back seat.

And truth is, there ain’t nothing a move can change about the girl who resides in my fractured heart, the girl who has left me for better and for worse. She is there regardless of geography. Regardless of happiness or a subsequent child or death or moving or Christmas presents. I'm the one who carries her memory.

Perhaps that will be enough.

Have you moved away from the place where your children lived and died? What was it like? Did it change the way you grieved, the way you thought about them? Can you imagine moving from the place you experienced your loss?

She's In California Somewhere

I was supposed to call him back months ago. He had left a simple message:

Hi, this is Eric from One Legacy. I’m calling in regard to a question you had. Again, this is Eric at One Legacy. Thank you so much.

It was a message we had spent a year waiting for. And it was there for the taking, for calling back, and I sat idle on it, pressing mute, or pause, or whatever it took to buy myself some emotional strength.

They had made it clear from the beginning of the donation process: after one year we could find out if our daughter’s heart valves could be used to help another baby.

One year. I remember wishing the time away, as if knowing what happened to her valves was all that mattered, as if I could skip facing grief and living in sorrow and missing the most important year of my life.

And then the moment was suddenly upon me.

I yearned for good news. I begged for science and circumstances to align in such perfect harmony for there be some life that was made easier, or saved, by the freak accident that took my darling Margot. I desperately wanted there to be a child crawling around somewhere with a part of Margot inside of them. The constant thought of this miracle materializing, of her valves fusing together with ventricles and atriums of another human being, seemed like concrete evidence that something beautiful came from her.

I have taken gifts from her absence, things I have deemed beautiful only because I don’t seem to have a choice to think about them any other way. I have taken the experience and carved out lessons and wisdom from it, become more fully human, more content, more thoughtful. But even all of the gifts in the world seem so trivial in comparison to what Margot got out of the deal, the one who didn’t even get a breath.

But these heart valves. This felt like something real. A gift directly from her to another, not a gift that was painfully extracted by her parents, but entirely, physically, from her.

+++

The nurse told us that if we wanted to donate, we only had a few hours left with her. They needed to keep her cold, she said. They needed to take her in for open heart surgery.

I opened her delicate eyelids and unwrapped the swaddle around her body. I studied every solitary fragment of her flesh, memorizing the shape of her elbow and the curl of her lip, tracing the outline of her sizable hands. I helplessly pleaded with her to miraculously wake up, even though I knew it to be in vain, and then pleaded and begged none the less. Rain cascaded down the window of our third floor ICU room, and I watched the dark ominous sky hovering over Los Angeles, as if nature and the state of my brokenness were in some mysterious union.

When it was time to say goodbye, we were sleeping together on a fold out bed, my arm wrapped around her chest, my nose pressed up against her hair. I placed her body in a clear plastic basin and watched her disappear around the corner.

Almost all of her returned to me a few days later in the form of ashes. Everything but those valves.

+++

Fear has me in a noose. What if there isn’t good news? What if her valves weren’t right? What if they sat idle for too long and were terminated somewhere, thrown into a bin, or saved in a jar.

I’m locked in my bedroom, phone in hand.

Hi, Eric. My name is Josh Jackson and I’m calling you back in regards to my daughter Margot. She died in March of last year and we donated her heart valves and I wondered if you had any information on those valves.

The words come out like one continuous sentence, sputtered out shaky and broken. I feel exposed, laid bare by a year of grief that has slowly eroded the confidence and security and strength that once filled my being.

Yes, hello Josh. I am so sorry for your loss. Let me see what I can find out for you.

There is a kindness in his voice that makes me want to weep.

Thanks for waiting. It seems that we haven’t yet found a match for them, but her valves have recently passed a follow up test that allows them to still be used. Usually our donations get used within the first year, so I would expect them to go to someone soon.

I don’t know what to ask next, even though the questions are streaming through my mind like flashcards.  How do they test usability? What happens if they find a match? Can we find out the name of the recipient if there is a match? Should I call back later?

Silence.

Where are her valves right now? The one question I hadn’t thought of, the one question that matters.

Silence.

They are somewhere in California.

Suddenly I’m thrust into this primal act of fatherhood, still looking for my missing child, as if I somehow forgot that her valves, still workable and life giving, were my daughter.

WHERE? WHERE EXACTLY IS SHE? WHAT IS THE ADDRESS? WHERE ARE THEY KEPT? I HAVE TO SEE HER.

I want to shout and scream, but the words never make it out of my mind. It’s all I can do to hold myself together, to keep myself from running out the door and into the drivers seat and to every lab and hospital in California, in search of what is left of her.

I thank him for his time and effort and grace and vow to call back in a few months, as if I’ll somehow forget.

Eighteen months later and I’m still searching.


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How far out from your loss are you? In what ways are you still tangibly confronted with your child’s death?