gone

We'll, I've just about done it.  Seems it has been my goal all along without even realizing it, but now it is as clear as day.

I've been trying to disappear completely and I'm almost there.

Since Silas passed away I've been step by step letting go of everything that can't help me.  Friends that can't handle my sadness, gone.  My previous car: rear-ended while I was not in it, and then subsequently totaled by the insurance company.  The future I expected as Lu grew grew and grew, utterly and completely altered, that specific path annihilated forever.  Even money itself.  We've never had much and I've worked hard to not focus on money as a source of completion and happiness.  Instead I've tried to just put my head down and work, roast coffee, get new customers, and just do everything as best I can, figuring the money will follow if we just stay true to our core values.  It's worked and we're growing as a business, but the bills always pile up.  In my mind, though, they are gone, immaterial, unimportant.

I've got creditors coming after me, but there's nothing for them to get.  We rent.  My most valuable possessions are my wedding ring & my Droid.  My brother in IT gave me the laptop I'm typing on right now.  My father got the loan for the used car I drive, and I pay him back month to month.  And then last night I took the final step and inadvertently cut all remaining ties to regular-world-life by somehow leaving my car unlocked, and my wallet exposed within.

I'm still not quite sure how I was so completely careless when I am usually exactly the opposite, but there it wasn't this morning when I got in my (father's) car to drive to work.  I hardly ever have cash on me, but last night I did and now it's gone.  I intended to use it tomorrow to pay for the sperm-freeze which is one step of our 3rd IVF attempt, but I'll have to find another couple hundred bucks to make that happen.

Thankfully, one of the things I do still have is a great family so they are going to help, but at this point I think it's more that they have me than I have them.

No license.  No ATM card.  No insurance card.  I've never lost my wallet or had it stolen.  Not once in my 37 years.  I cannot believe I was so stupid to let that happen, but obviously it's not the first mistake I've ever made.  Not by a longshot.  And compared to what I have already lost in my life, a few hundred bucks is essentially absolutely nothing at all.

Perspective is everything, I guess.

My perspective is unlike anything I ever expected.  I'm through the looking glass here.  Everything is gone except the love of my wife, my friends and my family.  I am finally here, all the way through, all the way emptied of objects, of possessions, of expectations, perhaps even of hope.  But it's not even that I'm now hopeless, more that I am completely status quo.  I am now.  I am this.  I am here and alive and I won't ever let that go, but all the extra and all the bullshit and all the everything I can't control it's gone gone gone and that makes me feel good.

My slow coast to this rocky bottom took long enough, but I'm glad to finally touch the bedrock and feel its cool, impenetrable heft.  There's more that could be taken from me, it's true.  Loved ones, my life itself, the clothes on my back, shelter, food, but losing those would destroy me altogether.  The gone-ness I feel is really a slow choice I've made to only hold onto these essential elements.

In order to survive I must love and feel loved.  I must eat and drink and laugh and sleep and shit and piss and cry and breathe.  My heart must pump.  My eyes must look forward and my feet must move me forward to whatever comes next.  But money won't save me.  A bank account won't protect me from the ravages of life.  A flimsy piece of folded leather and an ID tucked within won't hold back the disintegrating Universe.  It's gone, anyway, all of it.

I'm unlabeled, untethered, unincorporated.  I lay on my back on the bedrock of the bottom and look up, far up at the distant sky and streaming clouds and it doesn't matter that I'm on top of a mountain of grief.  My eyes are still open, my heart still beats, my soul still rages with anger and love and anticipation and fear, and nothing can stop Time's hold on my life and the inexorable rise of tomorrow's Sun.  It'll happen even if I don't look at the clock, or at the watch I don't have.

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

What were some unexpected repercussions of the loss of your child?  What have you let go or held onto since their death?  Do you feel like you're at rock bottom?  What helps get you up?

special powers

In the early days of shock and tears, my husband reached his last straw in trying to comfort me: she loves us—she would want us to be happy. I couldn’t believe him. It sounded so strange and wrong. She was dead, and a baby. How could she want anything for her parents? But he believed it. He felt her with him.

I haven’t heard from her in a long time. I could tell you that we once had a long talk, or that I saw the spiritual path her soul is on. But now those communication lines seem dead, so I fall back on logic. I say I don’t believe in signs, that my baby does not have special powers, and that she can’t communicate with us.

So have I become a rational creature now? Or are my feelings just hurt by the silence?

* * * * * *

Other parents see signs. In a precious moment, they notice clouds or rainbows or lightning bugs and think, this is for me from him or her, or my child has something to do with why this is so beautiful.

I envy that belief, because it eludes me. If I could see my daughter in the trees or hear her on the wind, maybe I would not be so lonely and angry. But it doesn’t work for me anymore. My child can’t be trying to contact me, because she is a baby. Not an angel. Not a fairy. A baby.  Her little fingers can’t operate the paranormal phone system. She can’t align the stars or send me a butterfly. She’s too little.

I don’t like hearing that she wants me to go on or wants me to know she is okay; that only points to my massive maternal failure. All she should be thinking about right now is snacks, cuddles, toys, and trying to pull herself up to standing. Not how to make Mom feel better. If she were alive, she would not want the best for me. She would want me to find her damn pacifier right now. That’s how I want it too. I want me to be the mommy, and her to be the baby. Still. Even though she’s dead.

And please God, or whoever is out there, do not let my baby be a ghost, wandering between this world and the next. Please let her be someplace safe.

* * * *

On the other hand, I have had messages. And I’ve imbued her with a very special power: the power to leave me.

In the hospital I began, irrationally, to worry that she did not like me very much. Her little face was so frowny, her lips so pouty. She looked mad. (Maybe they all look that way?) Holding her in my arms, this is what popped into my heart:

She needed unconditional love. Something bad happened to her, maybe in a past life, and she needed to know that Brian and I loved her absolutely purely. She wanted love untainted by the scoldings, power struggles, and tears that come with being a human child. By leaving us so early, she was assured of our white hot love forever. It would heal her, so her soul could go on. But it would break me, and I would have to accept it.

I had one visit from her after that. A friend did a spiritual healing on me a few weeks later; the smell of strawberries wafted through my living room on a cold March morning, and we both felt it was my baby saying hello. I could envision fields of the spindly green plants heavy with fruit, and how much my girl would delight in them. Later I planted a pot of hearty alpine berries and got a strawberry tattooed on my ankle, her name hidden in the leaves.

Since then, there has been silence. She feels utterly gone to me, and I feel rejected. I may say it is not her job to comfort me, yet I sit here like a spurned lover, hoping for the phone to ring. This is my deep dark secret—that I am kind of mad at my baby for dying. That I am kind of mad she never calls.

Photo by VanCityAllie

* * * * * * *

Why did I make up this terrible story about her needing to leave us? For a while it felt like a message from her soul, or from God or the great beyond. As the days have worn on, without answers, without comfort, my faith in most things of a spiritual nature has dissipated. Now I think it was just my brain trying to make sense of an incomprehensible event.

I’m not sure this was the best story to tell myself, though. It gives her the power to choose death over life. The power to abandon her parents. The power to hurt us intentionally. All of which is insane. She was a tiny baby inside my body. A very bad thing happened to her, and we don’t know why.

Maybe that’s just too much for my heart to take. I would prefer to think that she never wanted to be here, than to think she is out there in the dark crying for her mommy. I’d rather say that we do not get clouds and hearts and stars from her, because she’d rather be free. That’s easier to face than the plastic bag of ashes upstairs.  

Most of all, I need to believe that this experience is far worse for me than it is for her, because I just can’t stomach any other option.

So some days I try hard to think of her as happy. I try to see her as part of everything, reveling in the universe, sending love to our family every day. Usually I can’t. So instead I absolve her of all responsibility—it is one way communication down that parental, paranormal phone line. If she’s anywhere, I hope she can hear that I love her.

* * * * * * * *

Have you received signs or messages that help you connect to your child(ren)? Was there a particular window of time when you felt most connected that is now closed? What are the stories you tell yourself to help make sense of your loss(es)?  

i went crazy

On the day I'm to introduce our last new writer, Jenni of Demeter's Feet, I go to her blog and the first thing I see is this:

"Today is peaceful. I am writing. I am remembering. I am tending my baby's strawberries. I am sad, but I had my meltdowns earlier this week. Distractedly burned a giant batch of nachos one night, sobbed over pasta and sauteed zucchini the next. Have been by turns irritable, angry, quiet, exhausted. All the usual stuff. All the normal stuff. It doesn't worry me anymore. It's just how it goes..."

And I have all I need to in order to make the welcome. This is why we're all here, is it not? We're honoured to have Jenni's kind soul among us as a regular contributor.

~ Kate

On Route 28, a few blocks from my house, there is a drinking water dispenser. It's wedged into the corner of a shopping plaza between the Natural Food Mart and Plaster Fun Time. Its bright blue awning advertises "Pure Water," and a sign states that it has been U/V filtered seven times to remove all chlorine, bacteria, and impurities. It costs 25 cents a gallon, and you have to bring your own jugs.

After our loss, I got obsessed with this water machine. When I drove down 28 I would pull into the plaza, get out of my car, and stare at it. Was this water really pure? Was it really healthier than my tap water? Who put it there? How did I know it was really filtered seven times? What if it was dangerous?

I asked in the natural food store, but they didn't know anything about it. Google and the Plaster Fun Time people didn't know anything either. A notice tacked to the machine indicated it was regularly inspected by someone, but the last signature was dated several months earlier. In fine print was a phone number, which I called but got no answer.

Meanwhile I was drinking my tap water at home. With every glass I wondered, Am I making myself sick? Too sick to carry another baby? Is this water what killed her? Would the water machine be better? Or is it a scam, unregulated, unhealthy?

photo by calignosus

That blue awning became my Zoltar. In my mixed-up grief brain it held some answer, some clue to my fate. I wanted it to grant my wish of perfect, fertile health. But I was skeptical. I began stalking it, doing slow drive-bys, squinting at it out the car window, going out of my way to cruise past the plaza. Once, seeing a car there, I wheeled into the parking lot and flagged down the elderly couple who had just loaded up their jugs and were trying to back out.

Excuse me, I'm sorry, but do you know anything about this water?

Well, we've been drinking it for years, and it hasn't killed us yet!

What should my follow up question have been? Do you think tap water killed my baby? Do you think the Zoltar water will keep my next baby safe?

The notion that a person can go mad with grief has been around for millennia. And there are images in literature and film of mommies who go mad after losing a child. So, I knew this was a thing. I just didn’t expect it to look like this.

Weeping? Wailing? Throwing stuff? Sure, I’ve done that. But that’s sadness, not madness. It’s sadness, and helplessness, and anger, and even though it makes me feel so separated from “other” people, I know it is normal. A really normal response to my baby dying. That’s not crazy.

It’s the other stuff that worries me. Finding a bag of books in my closet and having zero recollection of who gave them to me. Looking down at my dinner plate to find I have been chewing on processed ham slices after years of being a near-vegetarian. Avoiding the gym because too much exercise can cause miscarriage or start labor (while being not at all pregnant). Stressing about a family paddle on a very small pond, because I keep picturing everyone drowning. Waylaying the elderly in parking lots. Fearing the tap water. Did I lose my mind as well as my kid?

It’s been about year since my last Zoltar drive-by—eventually I got fed up with myself and bought a Brita filter. And I’m sitting here now wondering how I’m doing. There is no babyloss measuring stick to gauge a return to sanity, a return to functional personhood. It’s been 17 months since goodbye, and this week, in a perfect world, she would have turned one. Today my mind is calmer but still thick with grief. So I have to wonder, what crazy thing am I doing now?

We still don’t know why I went into labor at 20 weeks. According to the doctors, there are ten reasons, and there are no reasons. And isn’t that enough to make a person nuts? But we do know it wasn’t something I drank.

* * * * *

What does your crazy look like? Does it scare you? Is it an ally, giving you permission to act outside the box? What do you do with other people who think you are crazy? What elements of grieving have made you feel most isolated and separate? What elements have made you feel the most normal, human, and sane?

why me?

Throughout the journey of losing my child, I have never asked myself, Why me?

Honestly, it’s just not a question I ask. Not because I wonder but won’t let myself ask. But because I could just as easily ask, Why not me? And because I already know the answer(s).

Why me? Because Tikva needed me as her mother, to love and hold her on her BIG journey.

Why me? Because there was a part deep inside me that was calling out – even if I didn’t know it – to be cracked open, stretched and expanded in this way.

Why me? Because even when I doubted it, Life knew I could do this.

Why me? Because I have boundless love and compassion – for my children, my family, my friends, in supporting others.

Why me? Because only through this could I become more fully me.

That’s not to say I wouldn’t trade it all in for a healthy, living Tikva toddling around me right now, nudging me off the computer and into a game of blocks with her. I would’ve been quite fine continuing on my way a bit less stretched, my soul less expanded, less fully myself.

But those are not the cards I got, and I want to remain in the game. So I’m making the best of the hand I’m holding now. As it turns out, I’ve got better cards than I thought.

***

I have wondered a lot if it’s all just about outlook, the color of the lenses on the glasses we choose to put on each day.

It’s easy when you’ve lost a child to go to that place of feeling like the person who got hit by lightning. What are the odds? In my case, they were somewhere between 1 in 2,500 and 1 in 5,000. That’s how often a child is born with a congenital diaphragmatic hernia. Me, I’m the one. 2,500 to 5,000 times more likely to be the majority, but this time I was the one. ONE.

It struck me sometime after Tikva died just how lucky I was that Dahlia, my first child, was born healthy and with no complications. What are the odds of that? One in how many? And my second pregnancy, which ended in miscarriage at 10 weeks – 1 in 4. Pretty high odds, but at the time I was utterly dumbstruck. Me? This happened to ME? I had to laugh about that when I learned that I’d made 1 in 5,000.

Back to outlook… I could look at that in so many different ways:

I must be the most unlucky mother in the whole world.

Someone out there must think really highly of me to be paying so much attention to my little self and giving me so many *$%@#! challenges.

What did I do to deserve this? Did I do something wrong?

The odds could be even smaller, I could be one in ten million.

The Universe is a random place, and shit happens.

Somebody has to be the one.

***

There is so much ego in this business of making sense of loss. So much ME in it all. So much of my busy mind trying to rationalize the irrational, comprehend the incomprehensible. Trying to fit something messy and confusing into a neat little container that can be shut and put away on a shelf, retrieved and reopened as needed.

I don’t think it works that way, though. I can put all of Tikva’s things – the physical reminders of her existence – in boxes in a beautiful wooden chest and keep it close by. But the meaning of it all – the WHY – isn’t so cooperative. And the answers don’t seem to come from my busy mind. From my ego.

Sometimes I ask Tikva…

Why me, Tikva? Because I needed you to hold me and look into my eyes and speak to me and kiss me, to lift me up.

Why me, Tikva? Because you are special, Mama.

Why me, Tikva? Because others will need your help.

Why me, Tikva? I don’t know, Mama, but I’m glad it was you.

***

I sat in a park in Jerusalem with Dave, just weeks before Tikva was conceived. It was sunny and warm and we lay in the grass under a tree.

I said to him, “I want to get pregnant.”

“When?” he asked.

“Now. Soon. This month.” It was just before Rosh Hashanah.

I was absolutely and completely sure. Ready. I had no idea why, but I was sure. Maybe Tikva was whispering in my ear. Maybe there was a part of me that was calling out, unknowing, for the journey ahead. It took us only one try.

If we had waited another month, would it have been Tikva? Would our child have been healthy? We didn’t wait another month. I don’t believe we could have.

Why me? Because this is my story. Tikva is my child. The only child I could have created in that moment in time.

It’s just not a question I ask myself, maybe because if it hadn’t been me, I would never have had a child like Tikva. And I would never have learned to love in quite the same way.

.::.

What are the questions you ask? Do you have answers? Where do the answers come from? How would you lost child(ren) answer your questions?

replacement

With our surrogate, Kyrie, just a few weeks away from what we hope will be the safe delivery of our son, I've been thinking a lot about the relationship between this possible new baby and the twins we lost a little more than two years ago. Of course, this new child can't be a literal replacement for the twins. But there's less to distinguish them than one might think.

 Part of that is simply the mechanics of IVF. One afternoon in April 2006, on the third floor of a big hospital in the Northeast, ten embryos were coaxed into being. Curled in their petri dishes, cells dividing, the embryos, from my point of view, were interchangeable. I hoped that at least one of them would grow to be my child, but I didn't care which one and I didn't give much thought to what would happen to the others.

The doctors chose two embryos -- call them A and B -- to transfer and froze the rest. A and B became the twins and we all know how that turned out. So, in April 2008, they unfroze embryo C, which is now, at least theoretically, the baby due at the beginning of January.

Although the selection of which embryos to transfer wasn't entirely random, chance clearly played the guiding role. Right now, I could just as easily be mourning the loss of embryos D and E or cautiously celebrating the impending arrival of F. And that cascade of contingencies make it that much harder to attach significance to the individual identity of any of them.

Moreover, over time, the twins themselves have become mostly an abstraction. I have almost no actual memories of them -- a positive pregnancy test, a dozen increasingly ominous ultrasounds, a month or two or flutters and kicks. What memories I do have are really about myself, my hopes, my wishes, my painting an imaginary future in pastel shades of pink and blue. And, though much more hesitantly, I find myself now thinking almost the identical thoughts, transferring the old dreams to this new child and wondering whether I can see this child -- at least in some non-literal way -- as one of the twins returned to me.

Because I tend to think in metaphors, and extended and heavy-handed ones at that, let me put it this way. Imagine you're looking into a series of lighted kitchen windows at dinnertime. In one lucky house, all the chairs at the table are filled with cheerful family members. In the house next door, there are chairs with no-one sitting in them, but you notice that they're drawn close to the table, still part of the family circle. In yet another house, the table at first seems full, but if you look in the next room, you'll find the unused chairs carefully, lovingly stored away.

And then, in the house I hope one day to live in, there's a chair that, in the manner of Schrödinger's cat is simultaneously occupied and empty.  And in it sits a little boy who is at once here and, well, absolutely elsewhere.

Your thoughts on the concept of the replacement child? A dangerous or unfair idea? An understandable rationalization? Something in between?

What does your dinner table look like?