"swapping little pieces..."

"Jackie wants a black eye,
some proof that she's been hit
John wants the answers
but the questions just don't quit..."

Music may have saved my life, my marriage, my soul.  Even in the darkest, bleakest hours of those first days with Silas suddenly gone, music pierced my impenetrable grief and keep something alive within.  Beck's albums Sea Change and Mutations managed to capture my attention even when I could barely think.

"And we're sitting in the rain
and we're feeling like the weather.
You could say that we're alone
but we're lonely together..."

When the endless flow of tears finally drained me to dessication, music filled me up again, if only to help me cry some more.  When I couldn't speak to anyone, couldn't listen to another word, couldn't feel anything but the black gaping chasm that used to be my heart, notes and chords and lyrics all-too-true wandered softly and impervious through that terrible void.  Music was an inevitable truth, something completely outside of me that connected specifically to my pain.  The music was a True Form that kept me tethered to reality.

"We're all in it together now
as we all fall apart
and we're swapping little pieces
Of our broken little hearts..."

Songs I had heard a million times suddenly became fraught with meanings I never suspected but were now powerfully, unbearably obvious.  Give 3rd Planet by Modest Mouse a try and listen for the line "and baby come angels fly around you, reminding you we used to be three and not two..." and just try not to sob.  Their other songs The View and One Chance are equally correct attempts to describe what we are all going through.  I had no idea, not until Silas died.  Then all of a sudden it was a like a code had been broken in my mind and all the secrets hidden in these songs were laid bare for me to soak up.

"Jackie's jumping in the quicksand
But it isn't what you think
she's safe cause she knows
the more fight the more you sink..."

It turns out that if anything has saved me from utter despair and pure insanity it has been music.  Love & friends & food all play a big part in keeping me upright and pushing me forward, but music gets inside my soul in a way that is extremely personal and completely my own.  I feel my brain speeding up as I speed down the highway with tunes blasting through the car.  Music far too loud had their been a child with me, but just right for someone trying to learn how to be alive and broken all at the same time. Songs stitch me back together again.  Songs take my holes and make me whole again.

"And we've been hurting so long
that our pleasure is our pain.
Are we madly in love?
Or madly insane?.."

Best of all are the live shows, though.  Blasting music in the car or in the house is great, but nothing compares to a completely spectacular live performance.  Lu and I found each other through music.  Our first real kiss was at Madison Square Garden on New Years Eve during a Phish show in 2003.  This year they played there again, and again we attended.  The brutal and beautiful history we have shared between those two nights is hard to fathom, but it was perfectly clear to me that I am with the exactly right person.  We had so much fun.  How that's even possible when I think about how much pain we both still feel is a complexity of the human spirit that completely baffles me.  But it is true.  We had an incredible time.  And they played just for us, as they always do.  The song The Story of the Ghost is always about Silas.  The first line:  "I feel I've, never told you, the story of the ghost, that I once knew and spoke to, of whom I'd never boast, for this was my big secret..."  And then the jam.  The pure music portions of that song where there are no lyrics, just notes, it always takes me on a journey into the heart of my pain, and I always, always need it and love it and want it.

"Yesterday's love defines you
and today that love is gone.
Tomorrow keeps you guessing,
the roller coaster's rolling on..."

There must be multiple, endless Universes out there, each with a slightly different path, each with their own cosmic tune.  The only way I stay sane is by entertaining the insane idea that there's another version of our family, one that is complete with a bright and beautiful little boy named Silas.  Maybe a sister or brother on the way.  Different numbers in our bank account.  A home up the street or around the corner with a little more room, a little more light.  And even crazier, since I know this to be true, is that the other version of me, he knows how close he came to all of this.

That helps me, somehow.  It is as though I'm taking on all the pain and loss for all the other possibilities, sparing them this terrible ordeal.  And those other possibilities, they are giving back to me a little bit of light and a little bit of hope that I have no reason to feel.

My reality cracked open the day Silas died and I have been diverging from my expected truths ever since.  Music, though is a truth I can always hold on to.  The notes and chords have become a scaffold I can hang my tattered soul on.  Their rhythm replaces the beat of my heart when the pain is too great for it to pump another drop of blood.  The lyrics tell me about my unbearable pain, but then trick me into moving, into action, into thoughts that maybe, just maybe I can bear his loss for one more day, if I just turn it up real fucking loud and belt out the words I don't yet quite believe.

"And we're all in this together now
as we all fall apart
and we're swapping little pieces
of our broken little hearts."

--Dr. Dog, Jackie Wants a Black Eye

What are your songs?  How do they help you?  What band or song or music has transformed for you since you lost your child?

enlightenment

I felt holy after she died.

What I mean to say is that I felt disemboweled, ripped open and gutted, my innards in a heap before me.  I, Prometheus, chained to a rock, punished for stealing a daughter for nine months. Grief swept down as I was chained to the cliff, feasting on my liver, or perhaps more like my sanity and sense of justice, as I watched desperate. But still, in that torture, not because of it, I felt holy. Holier than before her death.

It was a short-lived holiness. Anger unchained me from the rock, and became my closest companion in the days that followed. The expletives that came from me were inhuman and ungodly--a hymn of the self-pitying. But for a moment, maybe a week or two, I felt holy, and I have been riding its coattails, cursing it, making sense of it, meditating on it and writing about it since it happened.

Lucia was stillborn. I found out she was dead. And two beats later, I found out I had to birth her. Dead.  I wanted them to cut me open and pull her out. No, wait, I wanted them to knock me out, cut me open, then pull her out. I wanted them to do anything to prevent me from suffering more. I squirmed at the idea of having to push. I felt definitely entitled not to push. I wept for the injustice of having a dead daughter in me. I wept for me.

"Why us?" I shrieked. "What did we do?"  We have this common wisdom, or maybe it is a kind of whisper down the alley between women, that giving birth is the hardest, most profound pain you can endure. And then the other thing, losing a child, is the most profound psychic pain you can endure. I don't know. Giving birth to a dead child and then living with the fact for the rest of your life is the longest suffering experience I could imagine. I felt like I would enter into a stasis of labor. I would hold onto the pain and suffering like it will connect me with the brief time I had with Lucia.

During the time between finding out she was dead and birthing her, I was hooked up to wires, and sitting in a bed with contractions trying to make some fucking sense of what was happening. I opened the grief package they gave me. Front and center, in the middle of the page, there was a poem. I began reading it, and I recognized the words.

Where do I know this poem? I have read this before.

I skipped to the bottom of the page. I recognized the name immediately. It was written by one of my colleagues' husbands. I live in the sixth most populated city in the United States. I was birthing in a hospital that gives birth to over five thousand babies a year. And yet the first other person I encountered after finding out Lucy died was someone I already knew. Tears were streaming down my face before I realized I was crying. And I wept for her loss all over again, and for her husband.

As the waves of contractions pulsated through me, I realized that I was not the first person to go through the pain of labor, nor was I the first person to go through the pain of losing your child. I am not even the first person to go through them both at the same time. I was wrapped up in my suffering, feeling this narcissism of grief settle into my old bones. "Why did this happen to ME? What did I do? Why did MY baby die?" Me. Me. Me. And here was this person who also lost her baby. A person I knew. The fact that I knew her humanized her. I remember seeing her grief and her sorrow. It oozed into us all in the office. I remember running into her in the bathroom at work and crying with her.

Did I tell her enough how sorry I was? Did I tell her then that reading the email about her loss made me cry for the first time in my career in front of my colleagues? Did I tell her that every Mother’s Day I thought of her baby? Did I even say anything to her? Was I the person to her that I needed now?

No.

I am deeply flawed. It was humbling. I felt so completely human, and like such a complete fucking asshole too. But I felt so part of human suffering and the human experience. A wealth of compassion washed over me. And I suddenly remembered this Buddhist folktale called Kisa Gotami and the Mustard Seed. It is also about a babylost mother. I read it in many forms throughout the years, but about two weeks before Lucia died, I read it out loud to my daughter for bedtime. Back then, I read folktales and Greek mythology aloud as she fell asleep. They were more for me than her. I didn’t cry for Kisa Gotami when I read it. I didn’t cry. I didn’t see myself in her.

 

photo by quinn.anya

 

Kisa Gotami's only son died one night as there was a thunderstorm raging. Kisa knew something was wrong, because the thunder would have woke him. She ran to his bed and he was dead. Throughout the night, she prayed to all the gods, and then to all the Devils, it is written, but not one brought her baby back to life. And so she went to every doctor, chemist, snakecharmer, and charlatan in town. Everyone pitied Kisa Gotami because she was a good woman and she was losing her mind. Some told her that the boy was dead, others went along with the delusion that there was help. She finally made her way to the apothecary across the market. People told him she was headed his way, and so he was ready for her. He regretted that he didn't have a cure for her, but the Buddha, he said, who was once a physician, did. She ran to the temple and interrupted meditation. The monks grew impatient with her, as she was carrying her rotting dead son, covered with maggots, asking him to be cured. But the Buddha sat and considered her plea. He told her that he did have the cure she sought. And he said it was quite simple. She should leave her son with him, then she just needed to bring him one thing--a mustard seed. Not any mustard seed, though, it needed to be a mustard seed from a family who has not experienced death. As Kisa Gotami went door to door, each person said, "Of course, I have a mustard seed, but my father died this year." Or my wife, or my uncle, or my sister or even my son. When she returned to the Buddha, who had cremated her son in her absence, she came back humbled and enlightened. Death and suffering escapes no person. She became one of the Buddha's monks.

In my lowest moment, the poem, and moments later, that Buddhist story, took me out of my own suffering to feel compassion for another person's loss. When I left the hospital, I grieved for Lucia, but I also grieved for and with everyone in the world. I saw people as the embodiment of their suffering. Funeral homes on every corner felt illuminated, suddenly, with a kind of healing light. Every person grieved, like we grieved.  When someone would offer condolences in the first weeks, I would immediately tear up and say, “No, no, I’m sorry.”  Sam grew livid at that habit, as though I were apologizing for our baby dying, or apologizing for receiving condolences, but it wasn’t that. Even the anxiety and fear people had to approach me, I felt compassion for that. They were suffering. I could hear it in their voices. I could smell it emanating from their bodies. Some of those people felt genuine grief at my daughter’s death, and some had felt genuine fear at having to talk to me. I was sorry for them.

It is an incredibly healing way to imagine the world—compassionate, empathetic, vulnerable—but it was so disparate with what I had just experienced. I often thought about my sanity, and if I was sane or not. I thought of Kisa Gotami not being able to see the maggots, but only see her beautiful newborn son. I recognized that if I wanted to remain sane, I had to accept this world for what it is, not what I wanted it to be. People die. People we love die regardless of their goodness. Humans are fragile beings.  In the holy days, I understood this. I accepted it. I felt this amazing sense of connection with the universe and all sentient beings because of it. This calm emanated from me, and around me for two weeks. I sobbed often, yes, but for all of our suffering. Sometimes thinking about my husband’s suffering made me cry more than my own suffering. It was one of the most spiritually profound periods of my life.

And then it I felt it slip away from my body, the same way my daughter slipped from my body, growing colder and more distant. I am actually embarrassed to write this, because I lost this connectedness with everything and everyone. I squandered wisdom. Holiness was replaced with anger, bitterness and resentment. Rather than feel connectedness, I felt only alienation. I remember my Buddhist therapist saying to me, "So, you lost your daughter and then you lost your enlightenment?"

I hadn’t thought to call it enlightenment, but I suddenly grieved for my enlightenment. So many losses, I mused. I can't endure another. I felt enlightenment's absence more after I realized its preciousness. Then I doubted it I ever touched that place. Maybe holiness, I reasoned, was really the numb of early grief. Later I realized that wisdom, like Lucy, never belonged to me.

I sit cross-legged now, tap the gong and settle into my bones. I once touched a sense of everything by having nothing. It is the koan I meditate on now. When I had nothing, I held everything. The anger falls off me again in that moment. I can only ever borrow enlightenment and wisdom, because I will always wrestle with my human flaws. It is a true lesson in wretchedness.

 

 

Did your loss help you feel connected or alienated to other people? Did it connect you with a universal sense of suffering? How did you see your suffering in relation to other suffering? Did you gain any wisdom in your grief?  If so, what wisdom?  Or does the whole idea of wisdom and gain make you uncomfortable?



Correspondence

Back in your former life -- remember that? -- I bet this happened:  someone came to you with a problem,  or maybe you had one of your own that you dumped on someone else.  "Write a letter!" was the agreed upon solution, followed quickly by "but write a practice one first, you know, where you get it all out."

"But don't send that one."

And sometimes, just in the getting out, you find you don't need to send the letter after all.

Dear [Family member],

You have got to be the most self-centered, cold-hearted human being I have possibly ever encountered.  Who on earth could take a child's death -- someone else's child's death, I guess I should clarify -- and turn it into your own problem?  The gist of your martyrdom? Let me speak loudly so you might hear me:  It's not about you.  Check your shit at the door and support me in my grief, or just get the hell out and shut the fuck up.

/delete

It seems, unfortunately, that circumstances like ours lend themselves to a lot of letter writing.  Letters to doctors and lawyers and shrinks and RE's.  Letters to insensitive coworkers, bosses who just don't get it, friends who crawl away, neighbors who feign interest and do so poorly.  Letters to family -- especially the in-laws, to spouses, and even to dead children.  

Dear [Dr. X],

You know the day after my daughter died when you called to say how sorry you were and check on me?  That was really nice.  You know how you said "it was for the best?"  I agreed with you, because honestly I thought so too.  However, on further reflection, I don't think other people get to say that particular line in lieu of the grieving parent.  I think only parents get the right to say that, and frankly, we also have the right to change our minds about whether it really was for the best as much as we damn well please.  

(There's a lot of swearing in my draft letters.)

I happen to think writing angry letters is rather cathartic.  I prefer anger over sadness, because I find it easier to channel anger and actually do something with it -- like write a scathing diatribe.  Unfortunately, I had little to be angry about when it came to the facts surrounding my daughter's death itself -- no one did anything wrong or missed anything or really treated me poorly.  I would've loved to have released some of my steam on some poor unsuspecting L&D nurse or office assistant.

Dear [office assistant],

For the love of Mike, never, ever, EVER, ask the patient checking in at their six-week post-partum visit if they brought the baby.  UNLESS YOU ARE REALLY FUCKING SURE THERE'S A BABY TO BRING.  Because someone, someday, just might whip out a little box of ashes out of their handbag and say, "Why yes!  Yes I did!"  Which is what I wish I could've done when you asked me this very question instead of breaking down into tears.

Instead, my rage as it were took shape against people who didn't let me grieve appropriately, or who dismissed my child's wee life.  And instead of writing them letters -- even ones I never sent -- I started a blog.  I guess I viewed the entries as letters to some reader in cyberspace who could tell me if I was letting too much slide, going a bit bezerk over something trivial, or if I should clean it up and really send it.

Dear [fellow pre-school parent]:

Please please do not corner me and then go on any more about death in children's books and "how hard" it is to read and how you edit out those parts when you read aloud and how in fact you whispered the whole conversation to me like you were talking about the Karma Sutra and not Barbar's mother.  FOR THE THIRD TIME.  Because you know what?  Death in fiction is a fucking walk in the park -- it's goddamn "Ten Little Ladybugs."  Try explaining to your three year old why her sister died.  Death isn't dirty or something you should tiptoe around, you moron.

/delete, she was so nice to me at the potluck.  Sigh.

So as it turns out, my husband got a letter.  And it's addressed to him, and ergo not mine to blog about, but he let me read it and it has a lot to do with me.  (Apparently they think I'm the problem.  Which, if you were familiar with the problem, would blow your mind because I honestly think I'm the last person involved in this mess.)  And my husband, somewhat humorously, suggested that perhaps *I* should be the one to break the ice here, that *I* should make a phone call, that *I* should write a letter.

Dear [person who cut us out of your life totally six months after Maddy died, because I guess that was long enough to deal with us being depressed],

There is so much in this convoluted, loaded letter I don't even know where to begin unpacking it --  perhaps you might want to pay someone to start unravelling some of these thoughts.  It's called therapy.  Anyway, let's start in the middle where you mention your kids and how wonderful they are, and how you're sure we'd really love them if we could be around them more.  And how that went on for a few sentences.  And how nowhere in this letter do you once -- once -- mention my children, living . . . or dead.  Especially dead.  In fact, Maddy is the reason this letter is being written in the first place, you'd probably agree, and she doesn't come up once.  Talk about an Inconvenient Truth. But why guilt us about your kids?  Do you not want to see ours?  Or is this some one-way street kinda deal where we're supposed to feel guilty for this chasm that you sorta brought on? Then there's "Is Tash mad at us?"  Which makes me actually laugh out loud, because I sure as shit am now.  Although I honestly wasn't and never have been -- we've been under the assumption here that y'all were mad at *us*.  But thanks for transposing your assumptions onto me, because a grieving mother is, after all, batshit cray-cray, and obviously mad at just about everyone.  So blame me, that's fine, whatever helps you sleep at night.  And that part about lamenting that you happened to be nearby one day and couldn't call . . . why?  Why not?  Why is it incumbent upon us to call you?  Why can't you break the awkward silence?

/save.  Still drafting.  Not enough profanity.  Will never ever send.  Sadly, I am not nearly that brave, so I passive-aggressively sent a holiday card without a personal note.  

You don't have to reveal the addressee, but can you share a few lines from your letters?  Are they still drafts or did you actually send them?  (Did you clean them up much before you did?)  Anyone out there you need to sit down and write to?

Coming up

As my very busy December freight-trained on, once in a while I would pause, briefly (very briefly), to note that this fourth time around it didn't seem bad. In fact, it seemed downright ordinary. The first snow didn't put me in the hole, the cold didn't chill beyond the bone. It was just winter, a season that I used to love, and that, it seemed, I could love again. As I did my little jig for being all kinds of functional, I did wonder, in that whispered way you sometimes wonder to yourself, whether it wasn't just because I was so busy. End of term is never a time for tea and scones (except if said scones are eaten out of a paper bag in the car as you drive from one place you had to be to the next... um, but if you find yourself in such a position in my city, I can tell you where to get the scones), but the end of your first semester of solo teaching? Definitely not. And yet, it seemed more than suppression. It really seamed my grief season hadn't started, as it had been doing, at the very cusp of the first winter month.

It's not that I wasn't missing A. I was. I am. All the time. It's just that I wasn't knocked back on my ass, the way I usually am this time of year. That is, until I was. New Year's Eve, the day that has been especially hard in past years, tapped me on the shoulder but otherwise kept its distance. And then January 2nd gut punched me, dropped me to the ground, and sat on top of me for a while, apparently thinking deep thoughts. "Four weeks and counting, beyotch," it said, strolling away.

It's grey out. That's more a statement of mood than of actual observation. These days when I venture outside and encounter sunshine, I am surprised. I shouldn't be-- it's winter, not polar twilight. In the meantime, things are happening, most of them even good. I have classes to teach for this semester, and even in the area that doesn't require a lot of prep, so there's hope for family time. Monkey is making progress in some important ways. The Cub is speaking, and turning out to have as wicked a sense of humor as we sort of expected based on his pantomime gags back from the mostly-nonverbal near past. And maybe that's what it's all about-- as always, as in the early days, time stands still for no-one. No matter how much I may want it to pause, to stay, to let me catch my breath, it marches on.

And then there are the new twists. Despite my own firm beliefs and repeated statements to the effect of grief being something that changes with us, something that doesn't really get that much better, but something that we can learn to live with better, despite all that once in a while I surprise myself when I realize that this, whatever this happens to be at the moment, this I did not expect. That is, I keep stepping on the same rake-- the one where it turns out that I do have expectations, even as I tell myself and the world that I do not.

This year, this seems to be the reading of tea-leaves that is momentary and fleeting imagining of what he would've been like now. That's not exactly it-- I can't imagine it, I know I can't. Because, and this thought is not in any way new either, that's what is particularly sucky about our kind of loss-- we know jack squat about these children of ours. But usually, and by that I mean vast majority of the time over the last almost 4 years, I haven't been able to or even tempted to go down that road. He's dead, you see, and so he can't be alive, and he can't be one, or two, or three.

But suddenly now, suddenly I am straining for a glimpse of what he could've been at four. I catch myself straining when the Cub is interacting with older boys, especially the youngest son of our friends, the kid who was supposed to be A's best friend. I catch myself straining when Monkey and the Cub are raising a ruckus inside or laughing like maniacs sledding down the little hill in front of our house. It's only for a second, less than that-- a fraction of a second. But it's there, and as I swat it away, I also wonder why now? Is it because the Cub is speaking? Is it because Monkey was four the year I was pregnant with A? I don't know. All I know is that this is new and newly painful. But also reassuring in that way where the hurt is too real for him to have been a dream.

I am also changing. On January 2nd, as I sat in front of my laptop with tears welling up for no particular reason, I chatted a friend to ask for help. This is not something I usually do, especially not something I do when the reason for needing help is grief. But I took a deep breath and jumped. Not today, I said, but sometime this month, can we have coffee? I am going to need some TLC. She's a good friend, and there's a coffee in my future. One I am looking forward to very much.

 

How far into this are you? How have your significant dates been for you so far? How have the periods coming up on these dates been? How has all of this changed for you with time? Are there new facets of grief that you are discovering? What are they?

the back nine

When Brian and I were engaged, we used to joke about “the back nine.” Lilly, his daughter who lives with us, was nine years old when we met. Since she would (in theory) leave for college at 18 that gave us nine years of raising her. He called it playing the back nine together.

The back nine also meant the second half of our lives. We were ridiculously, giddily in love, like teenagers in the movies, but aware of our middle-agedness. When we married, the question of more children was on the table, but not well discussed. It was possible that we would simply make a family of three. Later we could launch Lilly into the world and ride off into the sunset—still healthy, only in our 50s, just the two of us.

Little did we know that when I walked down the aisle, I was already knocked up. And then we were so happy at this new plan for our future. And then we were broken.

Over this Christmas break, Lilly went to her mom’s for a week, and Brian and I took a mini-honeymoon at home. We cooked grown-up food, read books in front of the fire, and watched football naked under fleece blankets. We ate on no particular schedule, drove no one to soccer practice, and attended no parent-teacher conferences. For a few days, we looked like a carefree couple with no responsibilities. We looked almost like that original vision of our back nine.

I let myself try it on: the relaxed schedule, the freedom. It was nice. What if we stopped trying for another baby? What if we walked away from the whole IVF project? What if we looked at each other and said, Okay, it’s just you and me? We could do it, you know, we could pull the plug.

Photo by katerha

But I am afraid of becoming a bitter, childless old woman, mired in grief, ruining my husband’s golden years. I almost ruined our little vacation this week. One moment I was saying, “The sun is out, let’s go for a walk!” And three breaths later I said, “The pain of missing her is so bad that I wish someone would hit me with a two-by-four.” How romantic.

Our baby’s death has cheated us out of so many things, including the ability to dream our own future. If we hotly pursue interventions or adoption, I want to do it with my whole heart, not because we got screwed. If we choose to raise no more children, I want to embrace that path fully, and appreciate the time and freedom we would have, instead of always mourning for what could have been. But inevitably that road will be second-best too.

We could have had such a wonderful goddamn life, if she had never come to us (terrible mother!), or if she had never died. I am turning 39 in a few days and feel no peace about the second-best life we’ve been handed. Instead, I feel my advanced maternal age.

I remember a few years back, when I was single, sobbing in my mom’s car outside the Rochester airport. It was a pent-up cry that I’d been holding in for days. My flight was leaving in 45 minutes, and I was holding us hostage, wiping my snotty fingers on her lambskin seat coverings.

I wish I were 45 instead of 35, I wailed. I just want to know already if I’m going to have a family or not. And if not, then I just want to be an old woman. I hate this middle part.

Skip ahead. I now have a wonderful little family, but I still hate the middle part. I want to peek ahead ten years, to find Brian and I deep in that back nine, and to see, is there a new little grade-schooler out there on the greens with us? Or just the two of us holding hands, with a baby in our hearts?

The future doesn’t feel like a choice anymore, only a mystery. There’s nothing for us to do but wait.

* * * * * * *

As we enter this new year, what does your future hold? Have any of your dreams and plans for your future remained the intact through your loss(es)? Where does family-building figure in your future plans? If you could magically jump ahead in time to gain perspective on your life, would you do it and to when?