geography

"psychogeography - the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals." 

Guy DeBord

“No matter whether one is flying over Newfoundland or the sea of lights that stretches from Boston to Philadelphia after nightfall, over the Arabian deserts which gleam like mother-of-pearl, over the Ruhr or the city of Frankfurt, it is as though there were no people, only the things they have made and in which they are hiding.”

W.G. Sebald - The Rings of Saturn

My daughter was born in our local hospital, about ten minutes walk away from my own front door. She did not die there. She died in another hospital, in a different town, about fifty miles away. 

The first hospital is so physically close, so much a part of my life, that I have started to tune its presence out. I used to walk past and feel the air dense, a haze of hopes and fears emanating from the coarse render, as though my daughters and I were replicated in every room on every floor. Now it hardly registers, a grey rectangle squatting on the horizon. The memory of my daughters' births overlaid now with a dulling patina of time.

It is the second hospital that haunts my thoughts, the one where Georgina died. It is an old building, a former work house and then an asylum. A strange, twisty place, full of echoing halls and outmoded gadgets. 

My haunting started early, even before my daughter died. In the windowless NICU parents' kitchen, amidst the labelled pots of yoghurts and stained coffee cups, I phoned my friend to tell her what had happened. I suddenly felt myself whizz up to the ceiling and then higher still, saw from above my distress call emanating from the gizzards of the building, a flickering patch of bioluminescence amidst stone and cement, a synapse firing helplessly in an uncaring nervous system of concrete and discoloured gloss paint. Tap tap tapping. And I knew that this place was one which would not leave my mind easily.  

The room in which my daughter lived was a small one, a side ward with a blue linoleum floor. There were four bays, the twins were in the two spots closest to the door, Georgina to the left hand side as you entered the room. This place where my first born spent the majority of her life, where she took her final breath. A room I subsequently spent a great deal of time in. I failed to recognise the incubator in which she had lived when it came around again, or to locate the room where she finally died, where her heart stopped beating. My husband knew them, the incubator he pointed out, the room he would not, but they had already left my memory. This made me feel as though I had betrayed her, that I could not find these two small spots of contact between my daughter and the earth that remained behind her. 

Image taken from the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the BPL

I should like to go back into that room and stand there, now that it is empty of people, at nighttime perhaps? I don't know what it is that occupies that space now. An office? A different type of ward with larger occupants? I know that it is no longer a neonatal intensive care unit. That time has passed. The NICU is now located in another hospital on the other side of the town. I don't know what it is that I hope to find there, in that stillness, in the depth of the night. I always had a creeping sensation that there was something happening in the NICU, something hidden away behind the scenes. Because the plastic boxes and alarms surely couldn't be real. Too terrible and strange, surely a facade or a trick. Perhaps I hope that she is still hidden in the walls somewhere. Or maybe I am looking for pieces of her? Or shards of myself? Those that flew away with such force that pieces might still be embedded in the walls, those that crumbled away gently to such a fine dust that they could never be reconstituted, those I ripped out with my fingernails and cast away with a shudder of revulsion. Look, there's the part of me that cared when your boyfriend dumped you. That small pile of fluff in the corner, there's my certainty that everything will, in the end, be ok. That small translucent snippet of cellophane, a discard from some piece of medical equipment, the part of me that looked around eagerly for help, turned to higher powers for assistance and aid. 

There is only one other place where I can feel her so close at hand. Rather unromantically, it is the final toilet stall at my place of work, the one that adjoins the cleaning cupboard. In my dreams, the two places combine, to form a strange lurching amalgam of places where I might find some left behind pieces of my daughter. I turn away from her incubator to find myself in the toilet cubicle, although in reality these two places are miles apart.

I used to kneel there, by that toilet, clutching at the bowl, nausea roiling through my stomach. After she'd died, I walked back into the small, smelly cubicle for the first time in over a year and sunk to my knees again. I suddenly felt solitary and alone although it had been a long time since I had been a being in triplicate. I balled myself up amongst the cleaning supplies, laid my cheek down on the industrial size packet of toilet rolls and ached for her. "She was here," I murmured. "She was just here." And as I lay there, I momentarily felt that I could reach out, grab the empty air and twist it through ninety degrees, to send her hurtling away from her death and back to me. But, sadly, that proved to be just an illusion, although it is testament to my own desperation and craziness that I tried it. I had to check that it wouldn't work. 

 Are there any places that remind you of your baby or babies? Or where you feel a particular connection to them? How would you, or do you, feel about re-visiting these locations? Do you feel that you are looking for something?

the relentless pursuit of living

I'm used to the lies by now.  They are common and easy to say.  I say them for the sake of other people, but also for myself.  I have to lie so that I'm not always the guy that sucks the air out of a room, even if that room is the entire outdoors on a glorious fall day at the farmer's market and someone has questions about me, about my life, about how I'm doing.  There is no point in ruining every idle conversation and friendly chatter with truth about my dead son Silas.

You're welcome everyone I spared the honest recounting of my recent life.  It isthe absolute least I can do, and it cuts me with a slice of sadness every time I do it.  Three years since he died and it is still recent to me.  Because it is not so much that time has healed my wounds as much as it is that the wounds themselves are the very nature, the very fabric, of my everyday existence.  I miss Silas as a matter of course, just like breathing, just like moving my body, like blinking, like the beat of my heart.

I am still amazed to have learned that a heart can remain beating when it feels like only dust and awful and the endless void inside.  I am compelled to go forward, no matter the pain of my past.  If anything, his lost life is a fuel for me to live twice as hard, twice as present, twice as calm as I ever would have before.  Not enough, of course, it will never be enough.

Things don't always happen for a reason, and it is always better with Silas sleeping in a room just beyond the wall.  That is a lie I usually don't let people tell me.  That's one I have to correct whenever that awful platitude is thrown in my face. I try to be nice about it, but I can't help but say that no I don't think everything happens for a reason.

I think each of us are a living force to make reason and sanity and beauty and love out of absolute chaos and despair.  We lie to ourselves about feeling okay until one day it sticks a little bit.  We pretend that it is fine to not demolish everything we see out of rage and loss.  We answer the questions.  We smile through the pain, feeling the smile our son or daughter might have shared through glorious living genes.  We breathe their lost thoughts.  We dream their silent fears and inchoate hopes and live a tiny shadow life sometimes of what should be.  What could have been.  What isn't.

I have to remind myself that I'm not crazy sometimes.  When I wake up from the dream where I've missed the flight again, but I don't really care, but I do because I should but I really don't.  I have to lay there for a moment and chill, hoping there are still hours before the appointed time of get the fuck out of bed or else.  And I lay there and wonder how I'm not crazy, with a dead son and lost future and all.  It feels good, then, in the cool autumn morning, when I feel dream-crazy and life-crazy and sleepy-person-lazy-crazy and realize that everyone feels this way.  Everyone lies about how okay they seem to be going down the road feeling fine.

But look at the art. Look at the movies and books and paintings and poets.  Read the headlines.  Walk the streets.  There are endless crazy universes inside everyone's head.  A precise and compelling recounting of life and death and love and loss inside the brain of everyone around you.  Some are people of this community that don't even know we exist.   Babylost medusa crazed father parents that don't have their kids are out there in the towns and cities and hamlets where all of you live.  Not to mention families that are victims of car accidents, cancer, embolisms, old age, and on and on.

The people around us tell us lies to help themselves, to save us, to get by.

I always wanted to crush every moment of time that I have into a succulent nectar of life itself that I could wallow in and enjoy.  I thought that raising my son Silas was going to be the way I could do that.  I anticipated a rich life remembering my childhood as I stood there amazed at his development.  I thought I was going to be the best dad of all time.  I couldn't wait to learn everything I couldn't even begin to comprehend as I watched my son live his amazing life.

September 25, 2008 was supposed to be the start of an incredible chapter of life and growth and offspring and hope in my life and instead it was the complete opposite.  And when he died I had a choice.  I could give up or I could go forward.  For a moment the choice was absolutely clear.  When I was told that he was dead in that moment I could have followed him along directly.  A leap off the building.  A scalpel.  The wall and my head. But then right away thoughts of Lu and family and friends flooded my brain.  I had to be strong because this situation was already going to fuck everything up forever and I couldn't also double down and make it worse.

So for many, many months, not killing myself was the baseline I had established as "doing pretty good."   Plus, when you start there, getting out of bed is like successfully ascending Mt. Everest.  I gave myself accolades for simply going outside for a little while.  But those impulses kept growing, kept beating in my heart, kept pushing me forward.  I learned to lie and love it.  I learned to breathe again.  And yet I'm still not sure I can reconcile what my life should be vs what it is today, right here, one month out from Lu's c-section and the start of everything that comes next.

Everything is always coming next, and it is the incredible human spirit, our very nature, that allows us to face the day and tell the lies and forge the hope we have no right to expect and yet we do, and we do and we do.

Make your lies wishes.  Live extra bright and do not let the lies you have to tell stop you from living your life as honestly as you can.  We will always have a special armor, a veneer of experience that is too awful to wish on anyone but also incredibly, terribly, powerfully true.

Go easy through your day and let the simple, innocent grace of your lost child guide you toward patience and serenity.  Oh and also, don't go any more crazy than you are.  We're all crazy enough as it is, and that's the truth.

What are your lies?  What are your truths?  Do you believe that everything happens for a reason?  How do you fit the truth of your lost child or children into your sense of the how the world works?  Do you feel crazy and okay like me?

Silas' Season

It creeps up on me like the shadow of his absence.
I feel him first as a whisper breeze that cools a hot late summer day.
When a leaf leaves the tree, I fall with it
into piles of grief on the curb.
The suddenly incessant crickets every single night:
Exactly like his name in my head,
every single night.
The days tighten, losing light
as my heart constricts in anti-anticipation.
That moon, that September night, her labor and pain.
One by one, the leaves arrange into place.
The moon eases in its orbit.
The Universe rings my soul like a broken bell
when that perfect autumn eve
exactly captures the essence of the day he was born.
I cannot stand it once again
and once again I cannot move aside from the
drenching, gusting, cold fall storm
that is my face and heart and soul and hands
when his birthday is here
and he is not.

I have to settle for the fall.  For the piles I drive through.  For the crickets that sing their vigil.  For the cleansing rains.  For the chill of our loss on the last bits of summer heat, and the cold nights ahead where we have to hold each other close and let the spark of our souls keep his memory warm in our beautiful and broken hearts.

What does the season of your loss look and feel like?  Has it changed the way you view that time of year entirely?  Or are there other non-seasonal triggers that remind you of the day you lost your child?  And please feel free to offer a poem of your own, if you like.

Who was that?

When Catherine W. came into this community, I found her comments here and there, nestled amongst the others. Her insight and the haunting beauty of her words blew me away, and I wanted to know more of her story. It unfurled, moment by moment, through the months. Then, as though my prayers were answered, she began writing her blog Between the Snow and the Huge Roses. I think I speak for many of us when I say that it was as though her words were always here within us and around us, like the Poet Laureate of the Heartbroken. Her girls were born so early at just over 23 weeks, given impossible odds. One survived. One did not. She writes about that liminal place between lucky and unlucky, grieving and rejoicing and the intersection of all those emotions at the same time. I hope you join me in welcoming Catherine, as a regular contributor to Glow in the Woods. --Angie

One thing love and death have in common, more than those vague resemblances people are always talking about, is that they make us question more deeply, for fear that its reality will slip away from us, the mystery of personality.

From Swann’s Way -  Proust

I have to confess that I have not read any of the seven volumes of Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time.’ I don’t expect I will ever read anything that comes in seven volumes; life is short and time’s a-wasting. But my eye caught upon this quote in an interview with the novelist Francisco Goldman about his most recent book, Say Her Name. It is a semi-fictionalised account of the unexpected death of his young wife, Aura, in a freak surfing accident.

He summarised. The fundamental questions in death are: who was that person? Where did that person go? Who was that? And in love, it is the same: why does this one person, out of all the millions on the planet, suddenly merge with me so I effectively want to be her all the time? Why does this one person so enthral me? What is it? What was that? Who was that?

My mind, as it tends to when questions of love and death arise these days, immediately jumps to my daughter. Whose personality was, perhaps, more of a mystery than most.

When I have mourned the death of an adult, I have felt the tug of the specific. The particularness, the peculiarities of that person. And, when they have left, the question hangs in the air: who was that? I mull over characteristics and search through memories. With time, I have often gained some degree of resolution to that pivotal question, at least a partial answer.

But three years after my daughter’s death, this question is still keeping me up at night. Scratching my head in bewilderment. Wondering. Who was that?

photo by quinn.anya

My daughter. My half made girl. Whose brief life was so tentative and flickering.  Supported by whirling, whispering machines that gasped and kept time for her. This person who I am so in love with that I have tried over and over to inhabit her body, to live her short life. Imagined myself into that plastic box. Sometimes I even feel that it was me lying there, our identities have become so confounded.

Who was that? This person for whom I have been in mourning for nearly seven times as long as she ever lived. Already disproportionate according to some. But I suspect that multiplier is only going to increase. 

My husband and I were the only mourners at our daughter’s funeral and we were early.  We walked around the outside of the crematorium before the service. There were labelled spaces around the pathway, for the flowers that we hadn’t thought to bring. A space had been laid out for ‘Baby Georgina W.’ I couldn’t help wondering why she needed a qualifier.  Nobody else being cremated there that day had a preface. No middle aged man Joe Bloggs, no teenage girl Jane Doe. Only their names. But the babies, they all had that descriptor, a capitalised Baby, pinned to their fronts.

This type of loss has a nomenclature all of its own. It has qualifiers. Not just simple death. Miscarriage. Stillbirth. Neonatal death.  A different brand of death.  I still can’t decide if these terms are dismissive, diminishing, acting as a kind of Death Lite, or if they indicate that a death so very terrible has occurred that it needs to be somehow singled out. Death Ultra Ultra Heavy – handle with caution and step away as quickly as you can, thankful that this one isn’t yours to deal with.

Because the mystery of personality, the question ‘who was that?’ has a slightly sharper edge to it when a person whose life was very brief is under consideration. Sometimes I think the world at large cannot decide whether the loss of a baby is rendered insignificant by the brevity of their lives. Or made even more tragic, rendering the whole topic taboo.

That sigh, the exhalation that often comes when I add the qualifier ‘at three days old’ to the opening statement ‘my daughter died.’ That sound of relief that always seems to say to me, “oh phew, three days old, well that’s ok then. That is not as bad as the death of a three year old. Or of a thirty year old.”

Those words that so many of us have heard, “it’s not as though you knew her.” From the mouth of my doctor, a few weeks on, “It’s not as though you lost your husband. It could have been so much worse.” But he neglected to mention how to quantify the difference between husband death and daughter death and I was too sad to ask.

I ask, who was that? They say, why do you even ask that question, you couldn’t possibly know the answer.

My daughter’s life was very short and brutal, existing between the hazy ground of late miscarriage and the shadowy life sustained by maximal intensive care. A few short months in my womb, where I had barely started to feel her movements, followed by three days in the desperate world of the NICU.  My husband and I sat, craning forward over the desk, foolishly eager and optimistic, opposite the hospital consultant. He gently explained that there was nothing more that they could do, it was time to stop.

As she was dying, I felt I knew her in a way that I have never known anyone else. Perhaps because her entire life was spooling out in front of me, nearing its completion.  But I felt that she was not only the premature infant, dying in my arms. Her corporeal form shed away and she was simply . . . herself. At all ages and at no age at all. Looking back, I’m not sure how much of this experience was fuelled by post partum hormones and shock. But, at the time, I felt we had met. In a way that I have still not met either of my living children and, perhaps, never will. I hope that I will not see their lives complete, come full circle, as I did their sister’s. Time stretches their limbs and works on them, changing them inexorably and mercilessly. But not on her. The child who is, simultaneously, both the eldest and the youngest in the family.

In other circumstances where I have felt determined to get things right, to respond correctly, to inhabit the moment, weddings, birthdays, surprises, I have felt a veritable agony of self consciousness. And death is one situation where there is no ripping up and starting again. I was going to hold my daughter, just once. She was going to die, just once. And everything I had to say to her, everything I could hope to glean about her, everything I would ever know about her, well, that was the hour. It should have felt terribly pressurised. But, as my daughter slowly died, observed by strangers, I held her. And, amidst that strange calm, I felt that I knew her.

Do you ever ask, 'Who was that?' How do you answer that question? In what ways did you feel like you knew your baby(ies)? Or do you cringe even thinking about that question? Does it feel impossible to truly know a baby? How has that affected your grief and the ways you see your baby? 

Searching

When I first became acquainted with Josh's writing at his blog Jack at Random, I became immediately enchanted with the beauty and honesty in which he articulated his deep heartbreak. I grieved with him for his daughter Margot, who died March 24, 2011, after his wife fell and suffered a full placental abruption. In a blink, he lost his second daughter, almost lost his wife. The raw love, jagged and stunning, expressed in each sentence resonated so deeply with me. I found myself crying before I knew I was grieving for another. We are just so honored that Josh has agreed to join us here, as a regular contributor, sharing his journey as father and husband with us. Please help me welcome Josh to this space. --Angie

She was there for a time, in my arms, her cool cheek against my wet cheek, her pale forehead touching my forehead, her limp body held tightly against my chest.

Then she was off, in the care of impassive strangers, having open heart surgery to remove her valves for donation, taking little joyrides around Los Angeles between the hospital and coroner and crematorium.

She arrived back to me in a little white canister, her name neatly typed in courier font on a small strip of paper: Margot June Jackson. Number 4-2389.  Cremated 03/31/2011.

And then she was in my sock drawer. She was partly there to protect us all from the possible awkwardness of others seeing her, and partly to protect us from the harsh reality that our daughter was suddenly reduced to ashes. For those few days before the memorial, I saw nothing in my house but the canister. I’d walk past mourning grandparents, step over my two year olds toys, eat dinner around a table and it was all just a blur. My daughter was in my house, in a canister, and I saw nothing else.

And then we took her into the woods and poured her into the river.

And then I couldn’t find her.

For if we find the deceased in our collective memories, where they still live on, cemented in photos and stories, how can we possibly find our babies? When memories barely exist, a few hours here, a few days there, how can they remain present? And when there are so few collective stories, passed on by those who knew and loved and touched the deceased, how will anyone else remember or find our babies?

Heaven would be nice, if I believed in such a possibility. It’s a comforting thought to think I could meet her one day again. Reincarnation would be nice too, the thought that she might resurface somewhere in the world, another chance at the tricky elusiveness of life.  But instead, my mind only allows what I can know without doubt. She died. We had her cremated. And we placed her ashes into the river.

Even still, I search and search, looking around every river bend, under every mountain rock and desert plant, on the metro and freeway, in the few pictures we have, in my fleeting memories, in my letters to her. But she is rarely there, always just out of my grasp, always still dead.

And yet.

As the months trudge on without her, as my search turns up empty, as the solitary moments I had with her slowly scatter to the far reaches of my memory, I’m starting to notice that as my grief evolves, I can find her from time to time.

Sometimes I find her in this new life that has suddenly emerged, one filled with desperate sorrow over her loss and sadness over a life that has become different than I always imagined. And in carrying these losses from day to day, I carry my daughter along with them. 

Sometimes I find her in the water, in the river where we said goodbye, in the ocean where she eventually ended up.

Sometimes I find her in this new company I’m now apart of, the society of the suffering. We have joined those who know and experience loss, whether close to home or far away. I find intimacy with them, with you, and in those moments, I feel close to her.

Sometimes I find her in new friendships, which have only formed because of her absence.

Sometimes I find her in my broken heart, the fragmented pieces that drip with sadness but also hold her very existence. Since I can never have her back, what’s better - a whole heart without her ever existing, or a broken heart with her dead? No matter how short her life, no matter how little time we had together, she is my second child. And I choose her.



Where do you find your kids? Do you find them in different places as your grief has evolved over the months and years? Do you find them at the grave, in your home or the spot where the ashes were scattered? Do you find your baby in a symbol?






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?