reason

There is this forest road some forty minutes away from our cabin. The first time we drove it to check out the sights, it was a few months after our baby died. Sensing how we all need the solace and silence of nature, my husband R packed us all into the car for a drive. The views astounded us. The silence, and the liveliness of it all. And, to see large fields of ferns, growing amongst soldiers of trees, was simply an unforgettable sight, for us used to the gray and brown and small foliage of the desert.

Recently, we took the drive again. I wanted to show you some pictures, but none portrayed the grandness and nonchalance of the place. It is rugged, yet regal. Very quiet. So still, yet brimming over with life (and decay, of course). The forest road runs at a high altitude, so there are several points where you stop and look out over massive areas densely crowded with trees, across mesas and often eye-to-eye with the clouds. You feel you stand almost at the top of the world, centuries-old rocks supporting you. The ground beneath feels solid, after centuries of movement. It feels strong, after it learned to move with the currents of time and forces of nature. Sweet little colorful flowers bloom here and there to contrast with the earth-old trees and rocks.

Here, along the road, amongst the ancient and the transient, I could feel Ferdinand's spirit very intimately. I knew that I am surrounded by the wholeness of his spirit, even his body. I felt then that he was not lost somewhere, or forever, but here, in the present, at one with the nature and the universe, breathing with me everywhere I go. And here, for an instant, I felt that a reason did not matter anymore.

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For a long time after he died, I wanted a reason. Desperately. Holding the one page pathological report in my hands, I googled furiously for answers. Those laconic yet loaded terms, within them must be encoded the answer to the mystery of his death.

But I did not find any answers. Not at all.

I searched my brains for things I did and did not do through the 40 weeks that I carried him, and tried to find a reason. Why? Because I felt it would give me some control. If it is because I ate shrimps, then, the next time I shall not touch a shrimp and all shall be fine.

Except I know that is wishful thinking. If only it could be that easy, to have that reassurance. Something else could of course happen.

A reason was so important, so I could hold someone (that is, me) or something, accountable. So I can be on the other side, in control and be all-knowing.

Slowly, gradually, I know that an answer, or a reason, may well just serve as a blind. Just something to give me a false sense of control. Just something to give me the illusion that I know the answer to questions that never shall have answers.

So, sometimes, I feel, there is no need for an answer. Because then there is no false perception of being in control. Then there is no illusion that I hold the key to a door that I can open for others. Sometimes, when immersed in the quiet prowess of nature, I feel that no reason is necessary, only love.

But, only sometimes.

Do you seek a reason? How? Why? If you found a reason, did it help?

Thankful

It wasn't long after, maybe a month, that I picked up a book.  I was still swimming in the mire, crying uncontrollably, dehydrated, Dance Macabre filling my nightmares, heavy empty arms and leaky breasts consuming my days, all the while thinking:  I am at the bottom.  I am in the trash compactor of hell.  This is as bad as it gets.

And I began reading other stories of moms like me.

And found myself, surprisingly -- not often, but occasionally -- thinking:  wow, how horrible, I can't imagine, I'm so glad that didn't happen to me.

It's odd to be scraping the barrel and finding yourself giving thanks, but there I was reading about mothers who were denied the right to see or hold their children.  Women who were hustled along by the nurses who neglected to give those mothers what was rightfully theirs:  footprints, handprints, locks of hair.  Worse (to me), women drugged by doctors thinking they would appreciate sleeping through the process.  

If some maternal being, even a fellow babyloss mama, came to me, embraced me against her (lavender scented) bosom, clasped my hands in hers and pressed them to her heart, and earnestly implored me while looking tearfully into my eyes:

"Tell me what you're thankful for!"

I would probably scream, "Not a fucking thing," while cramming both our fists down her throat.  There is nothing here to be thankful for, not my child's sorry little life, and the unbearable year and half since.  Not the loss of my daughter's sibling, not watching my husband grieve.  Nothing.

Bite me.

And yet, late at night, while reading through your blogs and comments and words, I often catch my breath, mutter "Oh Shit," and think

It could have been so much worse.

I am thankful I married my husband -- I honestly can't imagine going through this with anyone less than or other than him.

I am thankful Maddy was born where she was, in this town where we had recently moved, and died in Children's -- which was recently rated one of the top Children's hospitals in the country.  They did not give me any answers, but they did not leave me with any doubt to her care, and their complete expenditure of resources and attention in trying to figure out what happened.  Her medical care was unparalleled.  Had Maddy been born in my local hospital, or in the hospital in my former state, we would be left with shrugged shoulders, and undoubtedly, "there's no way of knowing, nothing we can do."

I am thankful for Maddy's nurses.  They deserve capes and fancy wrist bands and theme music -- superheroes, all.

I am thankful my labor was quick, my recovery effortless.  I was on my feet immediately for a week of walking, crouching, sobbing, all away from home, my water bath and fancy salts and hemorrhoid cream.  And physically I was fine.

I am thankful I have pictures, even if they're not good quality.  The one with her clenched fist -- which is a sign of seizure, although I choose to forget that when I look at it -- is my favorite.  I choose to believe she's fighting.

I am thankful she died at Children's, where there was a bereavement department.  Someone spoke to us the day she died, and they kept calling.  They sent a specialist to talk to us about Bella, and had a lactation staff who dealt with ending it -- on a Sunday.  They sent us things we didn't know they had kept.  They still call.  They organize a yearly candlelight service.  She is not forgotten to them, and it makes it so much easier to drive by the hospital -- which I do on a weekly basis.

I am thankful for a small, but strong handful of friends who wrote me, emailed me, called and left messages for me -- when I didn't correspond back.  They didn't care, they didn't ask why, they just kept calling, writing, emailing.  They kept me from drowning.

I'm thankful Maddy's nervous system was determined to be mush.  She most likely felt nothing during her week here.  That relieves me more than you can imagine.

Most of all, I'm thankful I got to set the terms of Maddy's death, and that given what transpired that dreadful week, this one moment, at least, was in our control.  Of course I didn't really control it all, who am I kidding -- when a doctor says "she's being kept alive," basically the universe spirals out of control right from under your seat.  Sometimes I wonder if I could've done things differently, but ultimately she died in our arms.  Given all that happened that week, I don't want to contemplate her end happening in any other way.

Maddy dying is by far the worst thing that has ever happened to me.  And yet, I realize, it could've been so, so much worse.  And I'm oh so thankful that it wasn't.

In retrospect, comparatively speaking (or perhaps not at all), are you at all, remotely, even a teeny bit thankful for anything that happened surrounding the death of your baby/-ies?  And believe me, it's fine if you say "No.  Not a fucking thing.  Are you crazy?"

no dominion

Just for a second, I saw them, as if in a child's picture book or one of those Anne Geddes baby-as-cauliflower-type photo montages.  Legion, the lot of them.  Some in crisp black and white, Rogers and Nancys with white, salt-crusted headstones, all little lambs and angels.  Others were more Technicolour, like the garish, blurry snapshots of my own childhood...a Jason, a Robin, a "beloved baby boy".  One, much newer, I recognized; the newborn girl with the hole in her heart, the first baby I ever knew who died.  Across the sweeping hill in the older part of the cemetery I could see their compatriots...almost too many to count, dim and sepia, names obscured or hopelessly ancient, buried with young mothers or the siblings who followed in a series like stepping stones of sorrow.  For a second in the peace of the cemetery, I could see them all, each one a story, a whole life anticipated, condensed to a few dates and letters on a stone.  Each one a silent, plaintive testament to thethreshold we living things must traverse...into life, some way or another, and out.  For too many, the challenge insurmountable, the dates identical, cut short.

I do not go to the cemetery very often.  My own child is not there...we cremated him, still hoard the ashes in our bedroom with ambivalence, unsure of how to stage a letting go.  But I have known this place since my earliest years, when the grandmother whose bones lie here was alive and the guardian of the family stones, and I her charge, her companion in the regular pilgrimages of caregiving.  I fetched water from the old pump and dragged it to black, faded headstones of people even she barely remembered, fetched again and helped water the graves of her husband and brother and parents, all gone before I'd been born.  I listened and learned my family history in this place. 

While she weeded, though, I ran wild...and it was the childrens' graves that fascinated me.  I spun stories to myself about the children they represented, these names on the small stones.  I knew them, could have led a tour around the cemetery from Douglas to "wee Elmer" - though I was agog at the idea that an infant had ever been named Elmer - through the ones whose names were already crumbled away.  Rapt with the morbidity of childhood, I wondered about them all, spoke to them, flitted amongst them w eekly through years of summer afternoons while my grandmother tended the geraniums of people I'd never meet.

I drove through the cemetery on a whim, Friday, nearby and suddenly guilty because my grandmother has no geraniums to mark her place, now.  I stopped, and stood by her grave, staring at her name on the headstone, assessing...her name will be one of my daughter's names when this child crosses the threshold into whatever awaits.  I spoke to her, then, my grandmother, though I do not believe she's really there...spoke with love and awkwardness mixed, like a shy suitor.  I speak to Finn the same way, self-conscious; I do better listening for the dead than trying to hold up my end of the conversation.  Then I sat down by my grandmother's grave and drifted for a minute, feeling closer to her in calling up memories of her hands in the soil beside me.

That's when I saw them, all the babies.  My eyes caught on the first stone, three rows back and a few over, where it always was. It is a baby's stone, one where the dates, like Finn's, are only a day apart.   Nearly sixty years old now, that story, that loss.  I realized that the parents of that child are probably long dead themselves now, gone beyond whatever remained of their sorrow to the same side of the threshold as the baby they marked with a sandstone lamb.  And I looked to the left, where I knew the next stone would be, and suddenly for that one moment I felt like I could see them all, every one of them laid here, too small or too sick or just gone for no reason anyone will ever know.  They were neither beautiful angels nor objects of sorrow, of absence...just babies and children, real for a moment.  And time, finally, seemed to have made peace with them.

I wonder if, sixty years from now, when we here are mostly just memory, if the sting of our stories will go with us...if the words we leave here will bear witness only to love, to moments lived?

I long for that.

angry

In theory, I understand it.  It's a shield and a sword.  Protection from the knife-sharp comments or the knife-sharp silence and a blade you can turn against them.  It's the panther that walks with you, straining against its slender leash.  It's a Molotov cocktail.  It's a loaded gun.  

But, in theory, I understand a lot of things.  In practice, I wonder about the burden anger can be.

I don't generally get angry, even when, perhaps, I should.  Once upon a time, the man I couldn't imagine life without and the woman who knew all my secrets found each other and left me completely alone.   "You must be so angry at them,"  people would say. 

But I wasn't angry at all.  I was sad, terribly sad, so sad that I had to force myself to breathe, but I understood why they had done what they did and, more importantly, understood that, they hadn't really done anything to me. 

So it's hard for me to even imagine the rage that so often seems to swirl around the death of a child.  You could be angry at yourself, the doctors, your husband, your friends with healthy babies, the gods, the sunlight on the garden, the earth that spins in its monotonous circles as if nothing at all had happened.  But it all seems so meaningless, so futile, like being angry at a coin for coming up heads when you wanted it to be tails. 

You could be angry at other people's reactions.  People generally don't respond well to loss and say and do all the wrong things.  But, for the most part, they're not being malicious, just selfish and thoughtless.  And, while, sometimes, some people surprise you, expecting people not to be selfish and thoughtless is expecting far too much.

Sadness makes sense to me.  Anger -- at least anger at a loss --often, well, doesn't.  And, while I know there are emotions that transcend reason and that anger can be a force for healing, what I think about is the fable of the miller, who got rid of the mice that were stealing his flour by burning down the mill.

Your turn.  Tell me why I'm wrong.  Have you felt anger in the wake of a loss -- whether the loss of a child or some other loss?  What was it like?  Who or what were you angry with?  Was your anger an additional burden or a source of strength or comfort? 

amnesia

Counting the months on my fingers – November, December, January – I realize that it’s been more than a year and a half since the twins died. That's a long time, but, apparently, not quite long enough. When I sum up what I've been doing since it happened, I decide that, mostly, I've been trying to teach myself to forget.

Back when I started my blog, a commenter named Julie suggested that I take a look at the end of Deuteronomy 25, pointing to the verses about the Amalekites, a tribe who attacked the Jews following the exodus from Egypt: Remember what Amalek did to you on the way as you came out of Egypt . . . you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven; you shall not forget.

Though Julie had no way of knowing, this was one of the biblical passages that, as children, my brother and I found particularly hilarious. We even developed a whole who's-on-first routine about it.

--Remember, one of us would say, you need to blot out their memory.

--Blot out whose memory? the other would ask, eyebrows scrunched in mock confusion.

--You know who.

--Just remind me.

--You need to forget the Amalekites. The Amalekites. The A-mal-e-kites, Forget the Amalekites. Remember to forget the Amalekites.

--Okay. I've got it. I'm forgetting the Amalekites.

Pause.

--Wait. I can't remember. Remind me again. Who was I supposed to forget?

But remembering to forget turns out not to be a contradiction in terms. If you can't erase the past through an act of will, you can obscure it, soften its sharp edges, dim the spotlights, mute the voices. Back at the beginning, when I was terrified that that I'd never be able to escape the words and pictures in my head, I deliberately questioned each of my recollections, cast doubt on every memory as it surfaced. Was I in the hospital for two weeks or three? What did the social worker suggest that I do? After a while, I couldn't be sure. And I feel fortunate that there's no anniversary date for me to dread, because I can no longer remember exactly when they were born.

I realize that many people, most people, perhaps, want something different, want, in fact, the exact opposite. But I sometimes wonder if remembrance causes more pain than it eases. And despite the obvious evidence to the contrary, I tell myself that if I had a way of blotting out all memory of the twins from under heaven, I would do without a second thought.

Here's the thing. Imagine you're on a ship setting sail. For a while you can still decipher the expressions on the faces of the people standing behind you, crowded together on the dock. Eventually, though, the expressions, the faces, the people, and the dock itself shrink, blur, run together. More and more, your attention turns to the grey sky and the greyer water in front of you. The waves curl white and you take out a chart and run your finger across it. On shore, everyone is eating dinner at their own tables in their own houses. The dock is empty and no-one is watching, wondering if it's really true that the tips of the sails are the last part of the ship to vanish beneath the horizon. Even if you looked back, there would be nothing to see.

my son may be in your vacuum cleaner

Seriously. You may wanna go check.

Ferdinand was cremated. There is a possibility that some of his ashes, minute particles of them, escaped the plastic bag that it was supposed to be loaded into and tied firmly and then placed in a plastic box and then a velvet bag and then handed over to us with sympathies.

Some of the ashes may have flown undetected onto the floor of the crematorium and carried about by the shoes of the good guy who helped us cremate our son. Maybe some tiny particles of my son’s ashes got onto the good guy’s shoes and it got thumped off at the post office when he went in to get his mail and some of the dirt was sucked up by the ventilator which re-circulated it into the mailroom and got shuffled into the mail and then got stuck onto a part of an envelope and maybe that envelope is somewhere in your house.

When his ashes arrived in Singapore, at the temple, and they were emptied, from plastic bag to urn, and the breeze, almost ever-present, might have swept up a whiff of the ashes, and they got mixed into the food being prepared for the temple lunch. Or, it got stuck onto somebody’s sweaty arms (it is very humid there) and got carried all over the small island-state, or that somebody got onto an airplane headed for the Swiss Alps and so a part of Ferdinand ended up in a different continent. Have you had a guest recently? Check their shoes, you may find my son.

Before he was cremated, I held him, hugged him tight, and kissed him. Tried to make an imprint on him and tried to engrave his body onto mine. Maybe some of his skin cells were brushed off and stuck on to me, for a few seconds. Then, they may have fallen onto the floor, and got swept out of the funeral home as we exited. The wind from the hills may have swept those cells up, carried them across the country, and dumped them somewhere on the East coast.

The dust may have fallen into your house when you opened your door or your window. You decided to vacuum the house. And there he goes, into your vacuum cleaner.

Or, a few molecules of my son’s ashes may be fertilizing your tomatoes right this very second.

I do sound like I am spinning a tall tale, aint’t I?

Except, we know that everyday the world is on the move, in every sense, whether you take the macro- or micro-view. Foods are transported over long distances, and with them, dust. Air circulates, moves over distances, taking sounds and smells and small tiny particles, including human ashes, with them.

Dust is very tiny. Anything smaller then one-sixteenth of a millimeter in diameter can be defined as dust. They come from everywhere and from anything- dirt, pollen grains, tire rubber, salt sprays from the ocean, skin flakes, fire ashes, volcanic eruptions, desert sands, animal fur, and, let’s not forget about cosmic dust. You may have star dust in your vacuum cleaner too.

When a supernova explodes, it sends small particles of dust far out into space, and some of this dust falls on Earth. You may find some of these cosmic dust particles inside your nostrils.

What is more fascinating is that you cannot destroy dust. You dust, vacuum and sweep, and pour everything into your garbage can and think it is good riddance when the garbage truck rolls around on Monday morning. Well, some of that dust is still on your driveway because when the garbage gets dumped, air gets moved and the air moved the dust too. Rumor is, dust from the dinosaurs still remains, because there is no way you can destroy dust. They move around, get mixed into things of all sorts; things break down, and the dust re-surfaces again.

Come to think of it, dust is a beautiful thing. And so indestructible. So durable, it is forever. Forever swirling around. Here, in my house; there, in your house; on earth, over earth; in the vast Universe, and probably beyond too. Ferdinand, my baby, in my current system of belief, is part ashes, part dust, part soul and part spirit. And so he may well be everywhere right now.

Perhaps in your vacuum cleaner, too.

I will never look at the world the same way again. I will never see dust the same way ever again.