The meaning of (a) life

The quote above is from the Jerusalem Talmud, section Sanhedrin 4:1 (22a), if we are being precise. It's Hebrew, so it's read right to left. The second part, one to the left of the coma, translates to "and whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world." If you've seen Schindler's List, you might recognize the quote as a less flowery translation of what was engraved on the ring that the Jews Oscar Schindler rescued made for him.

What's important to me, though, is that that part, the often-quoted part, is the second part of the sentence. The first part, and for some reason it seems important to me that between the two it comes first, translates to "[w]hoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world."

Nobody is responsible for my son's death-- there was no humanly possible way to save him. But, yes, what was lost when he died, what we lost, is an entire world.

That's what we all lost, some several times over. Together-- galaxies, universes even. The mind boggles at the enormity.

In math infinity is not an easy concept to teach. Not necessarily because of the initial presentation, describing what infinity is, but because later it turns out that sets of things that you would intuitively expect to be of different sizes, even sets where you have an intuitive idea of which should be bigger, they turn out to all be of size infinity. For example, the size of the set of whole numbers is infinity. But, and this is intuitively non-obvious, the size of the set of odd numbers is also infinity. As, incidentally, is the size of the set of all numbers between 0 and 1. This is not a math lesson. It is a sort of a meditation on zooming back in, from the idea of the enormity of our collective losses put together to our individual losses, to each little life that did not get to be or did not get to be as long as we wished it to be. Each one a world. Still enormous, still mind-boggling.

Which is why, I think, looking for meaning in their deaths, looking for a reason, a higher purpose, whathaveyou, just doesn't sit right with me. What is lost is so profound, so shattering, that in my book  there is simply no reason good enough to justify it. There is nothing that can be put on the scales opposite the would-be world that is my son's life that would even it out. Nothing is worth it.

Once, almost by accident, I got to see an internal volunteer training manual of an extremely well-respected organization that works with bereaved parents. It had many good and compassionate rules, including one about not making yourself and your motivation for being there the focus point when interacting with bereaved parents because it should not be about anyone but the bereaved family. But then it also had a note from one of the founders of the organization, who is not a bereaved parent. In describing what led them to become a co-founder of the organization, the person talked about their very first interaction with a family that found out that their baby was about to die. It's a very moving story, and honestly I am deeply grateful that in that family's hour of need, this person was there for them. What did not sit well with me was the last part of the note. The gist of it is that when it was first happening, the future founder of the organization had a hard time dealing with the "why?" questions, but that now that they went on to found and build this organization, now they understand.

I remember feeling dumbfounded after reading this. I like the organization. I respect what they do. I think what they do is extremely important. But what the founder said struck me as remarkably self-absorbed. That someone would say that a person, a child, had to die to motivate and empower them, even if it is to help others whose children die, seemed to be to lack perspective, both in terms of what that death actually means (see: entire world, lost) and in terms of what seems like an extremely inflated sense of their own importance in the world. I mean, I can't imagine anything that I could possibly go on to do with my life that would be worth someone else's life, let alone a life so new that the outlines of the world lost as a result are barely perceptible through the fog.

I don't need to find a meaning in my son's death. Or, more precisely, I don't think there can be meaning grand enough to be worthy of him, to be worthy of the enormity of what it means to have to live without him.

To me, my son's death doesn't have to be beautiful and meaningful. It doesn't have to teach anyone anything, and it doesn't have to have changed our lives for the better. In fact, I think if someone tried to find anything of the sort in our story, I'd be beyond livid.

I remember a post on someone's blog from when I was only a couple of months out from A's death that has stayed with me throughout the years. The post was about how of course the deaths of our children are unfair, about how we, the survivors, didn't deserve it. There was a quote too, about how the only thing worse to imagine than their deaths being unfair and undeserved is for their deaths to have been fair and deserved. Jeez, right? What would you have to do to deserve to have your kid die? And if you put it that way... Well, the beauty and meaning thing, I feel similar about these-- what in the universe can possibly be worth my son's life? I have only one answer to that-- nothing, absofrigalutely nothing.

Which doesn't mean that I do not see beauty in our stories, in our story. The difference is that to me the beauty is internal.  It doesn't come from or depend on anything that happened as a result of A's death It's jagged and mangled, and may not look like beauty to anyone but us, and let's face it-- few are willing to look for long enough to see it. The beauty I see is in the origin of our pain, in why our worlds are torn and our hearts-- a mess of shards. That, of course, is grief, the new and unbidden roommate-inside-us.

To me, there is beauty in the pain, in the grief. But not because I enjoy the sight of blood and gore-- I don't. I see beauty in why the pain and the grief are there. They are there because we love our children. And when they die, when we lose the world that was to be them, the pain is the reflection, the mirror image of the love. And to me, that's good enough. Actually, to me that's the only way it can possibly be.

 

What about you-- do you need there to be meaning? Have you looked for it? Are you still looking? Has your answer changed over time? If yes, how? Why?

the places you'll go

Today we welcome guest writer TracyOC from Mommicked. Her incredibly insightful, clever writing reflects the dichotomy of babylost grief—gratitude in a moment, the heartbreak of forever. In 2007, Tracy OC's twin daughters were born at thirty-two weeks, suffering from Twin-to-Twin Transfusion Syndrome. Her daughter C. lived. Her daughter R. died. —Angie

There is a hat sitting on my desk that is bound for Australia.   

Australia.

It seems so far from my little town on the east coast of the US—practically half a world away with totally different seasons and ecology.  Then again, we’re practically next door neighbors if you consider the infinite and ever-expanding nature of the universe.

And there’s the hat itself that makes the world a little smaller.  It is a gift for another babylost blogger, knitted in honor of the fourth anniversary of my daughter, R's, death.

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R was born at thirty-two weeks, one minute before her identical twin sister, C.  R died when she was twelve days old, worn down by the compounded effects of twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome (TTTS), lower-than-expected birth weight, necrotizing enterocolitis and critical pulmonary valve stenosis. The day she died, a cardiologist stood over her bed in the NICU and said, "Sometimes the deck is just too stacked."

C was also smaller than the average thirty-two-weeker thanks to TTTS. But, even though her deck had also been pronounced ‘stacked’, she had a full complement of working parts and a deep well of baby rage. She graduated the NICU in three weeks—three pounds of piss and vinegar.

They were barely seven pounds together at birth yet, they encompass the full span of possibilities offered by parenthood. At the very least, they’re perched on the fence that defines the perimeter—almost died and almost lived.

+++

"You never know where your kids will take you."

My mom had a friend who used to say that. Her sons traveled the world as members of a famous boys choir. C hasn't done much traveling yet but I can feel the potential hovering just out of sight like the bones of her adult self that are starting to push through the pudge of her four-and-a-half-year-old face. Soon she will become who she is going to be. Soon the small world that my husband, T, and I share with her will expand beyond birthday parties and three-on-three soccer matches and bikes with training wheels into an everything that I can’t even imagine.  Because you never know.

When I think about R, at first, it feels like I know. She spent her entire life inside a plastic box. She was four pounds and sixteen and a quarter inches with blue eyes and curly, yellow hair.  Her eyelashes were just starting to come in. She got to ride in an ambulance.

I can peer into the space where her possibilities ought to be and it looks like an empty pit. I know that there will be no travels, no victories, no failed adventures. Nothing is hovering in the shadows here.

Lately, R’s nothing seems to be the same size and shape as C’s everything.

They both fill all the space inside my head and push until I feel like my skull will shatter into dust and get carried away on the breeze. 

And I wonder how different they are. Is a dead daughter the furthest thing imaginable from a living daughter? Or, when you consider the vast, unending possibilities of all existence, are they more like next door neighbors?

C’s body doesn’t give her entrée to every possible path. In fact, the body that she has is already limiting her possibilities. She’s never gonna be in a famous boys choir, anyway. Similarly, R’s lack of a body doesn’t completely cut her off from the human experience. She is loved. She is remembered. 

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I chose some fancy yarn for this hat that is bound for Australia—much fancier than I'd choose for a friend that I met through other circumstances. Special occasion yarn, if you will. The yarn is manufactured in Japan, Japanese silk spun with wool imported from, you guessed it, Australia.

This giant planet made small by the wonders of technology.

Sheep hair from one continent and fiber extruded from the salivary glands of moth larvae on another continent and jet airplanes and internet yarn stores and the blogosphere all twisted together by a mother who misses her daughter for another mother half a world away who misses her daughter too.

This giant planet made small by the most basic of all wishes.

R exists in a shadow world that is infinitely large and governed by things that I can't really explain. She is an ache in my soul, an unfillable void. But she is also every worthwhile thing that I’ve learned about grief and loss. She is a thread that runs all the way back to the earliest humans and on into the unending future, stitching me to the log ladies of folklore and the brilliant minds pushing at the frontier of modern medicine. She is a web that connects me to parents all over the world. She is a hat that is bound for Australia.

You never know where your kids will take you.

Have you connected with other grieving parents around the world? Have you had a chance to talk or visit them? What places have you "gone," figuratively or literally, since your baby or babies died? Where do you want to go? What other surprising connections have you made?

Future Perfect

This post is brought to you by 80s synth chords and spaceships made from tinfoil and fishing wire. I'm wearing epaulettes. Yeah, they came back round. The president is a lesbian. I have a belt that makes me invisible. It's awesome. Errr... just trying to create a little atmosphere, folks. Sheesh. The point is, I'm writing from the future.

Today is four years.

Four years ago she died. Four years ago she was born. Four years ago time stopped. Life paused. She was still and so was the world. 

I didn't have the capacity to think beyond that room, that moment. There was no space for "next." And yet events continued to unfold and now I'm here in the future, and it is... different. It is not how things were going to be. It is so unfamiliar, this place.

Jess-that-was is no more. Life-that-was-to-be has not happened. And it's not bad. But it's not what I had planned.

But maybe this would have happened anyway. Maybe you would still have grown apart. Perhaps this was always going to be this way. You. Him. A tree. Some lemon tart. Two living kids singing Happy Birthday. A look exchanged. And then the turn away: Turn away. We are no more.

He blames today on then. I asked him once: where did it all go wrong? Did you ever feel content? And he recalled a time before she was born. He painted our new house for two small girls to grow in. He was so ready to step in to that life. 

But here we are apart. Four years on. There's one girl, one boy and one little jar of ashes. The same house, paint peeling. Looking out; looking beyond. To what?

Sometimes I try to see. I turn the tarot endlessly and hold my breath for Four of Wands, but normally it's just The World or The Wheel and I'm like yeah, yeah, brilliant, whatever, it's not the card I'd choose, but I'm sure I can twist it to mean something vaguely convenient.

And I think back to Jess-that-was, and all her wants, her hopes. Poor fool. She couldn't know the path that she would walk. Yet here I am, a fool again. The future unfamiliar looms, forever imperfect.

She'll not be there. And I still stand. No, I still walk. Towards... towards... towards...

A raygun and rehydrated food. A robot mixing martinis. A womb that's closed for business. And epaulettes, gold epaulettes. 

Do you think about the future? What do you believe it hold for you, now? 

 

raven

I am wearing a pink gown, the opening in the front. I am grateful for that small gift--back openings makes me feel so vulnerable and undignified. There is a paper blanket covering my legs. My shaking hands fumble with the thinness. I tear a hole in the thigh. It is not meant to keep me warm, I remind myself. There is a blood stain on it, already. I lean back on the table. There is a skylight over the stirrups. The rain falls like a war drum, hard, without rhythm, but persistent. The wet leaves cover the bottom of the skylight.
 
Nature keeps falling, water and leaves. Dead things that look alive. I stare at the counter. Purell and ultrasound gel. A pap smear kit, and non-latex gloves. A black bird flies over the building. It looks like a shadow of a happier bird, something predatory, but special. I know the baby is dead before he tells me. I have imagined the baby dead in all the moments I am not actively thinking she might be alive. But I wait for him to say it aloud.
 
The doctor tells me it looks like a miscarriage. I am twelve weeks pregnant, but with the labwork and the bleeding and the ultrasound without a heartbeat, an empty sac, perhaps, the baby is gone, or was never there. A paradox I may never unravel. My uterus growing and believing, even while I am stunted and cynical.
 
The doctor convinces me to go for another ultrasound because of the trauma of Lucy's death. He thinks I should see there is no heartbeat again. He said, "Just so you know, deep within you, that we did not make a mistake." And I tell him steadily without tears in my voice that I held my dead baby and I still thought it was a mistake. Her skin was torn and growing colder, and I thought she would live again. I thought there was some system-wide error, that she could still come back, if someone did something other than mourn. I thought I could puff my lungs up, cover her nose and lips, and breathe life back into her, as though the doctors and nurses hadn't quite thought of that yet. "She just needs some air," I wanted to explain. "We just need to remind her to breathe."
 
Sometimes I still think that perhaps we cremated her too soon.
 
I watched a hawk chase a raven, diving and attacking. It was a spectacular show above us as we hiked through the woods to a waterfall. We all stopped and gawked. I bent over in the first bangs of unbearable cramping. The ravens have been around me all this month, waiting for the death in me to escape. The ravens swoop low, cross in front of my car, reminding me that I can lose once, lose twice, I could lose them all. It has been an unkindness of omens--dead baby birds on my front steps and ravens, stopping me in the street, daring me to hit them. Maybe I should call the nevermore baby, Raven, the blackness, the hole within me.
 
I received an email just as I began bleeding. "Your life is beautiful, so beautiful now. Do you appreciate it? I think you do. I appreciate it, but I can't bear it. I have to look away. It is painful how beautiful it is." It is beautiful, even though our daughter died. I made something else out of her death--a life I always wanted to live. I understand if someone can't bear it. Joy reminds me of grief too. Happy reminds me of sad. And besides, two children is something, I get that. Two living children cover the holes where the others were. You'd never notice if you didn't search for the spaces where others were supposed to be, if you didn't read our stances and our smiles. It would be hard not to believe the lies we are telling in our photographed smiles. My dead outnumber my living now, but still two children is not all of your children dead. I do appreciate it.
 
What I wanted to say, though, is that we still suffer. We have a beautiful life, but we still suffer.
 
They search my womb and they don't find the baby. The technician says the baby is dead, even though she is not supposed to say it aloud. Words I needed to hear. In moments, I begin the process of miscarriage, passing clots and tissue. As though my body was holding onto her, until someone could speak the truth that she died. The little dot inside of me that was growing once is gone now. The children would ask me how big she is every day. And I would tell them the size of an olive, the size of a lime, the size of a peach. But she was no size, just my womb grew, making space for an unkindness. She is an empty space now. A hole of what could have been.
 
I thought I could slip under the radar with one more quick baby, like Fate could turn her attention somewhere else for a quick nine months. "The last time. The only time. One chance," I said to my husband. "One more chance at one more child, then nevermore."
 
photo by Brian Auer.

I know what I know and I still got baby greedy. I still thought somewhere in me that things would end differently. I am not ranking my sadness, but this is a small grief compared to Lucy. Lucy died, and I held her. I felt like I knew her, she was in my womb for 38 weeks nary a thought of life without her. I never imagined her dead in those 38 weeks. But my little raven died and I only ever imagined her dead. (It didn't help the pain.) 
 
Perching on the fence in my backyard, like the raven, Grief waits for the physical pain to subside to invite himself into our home again. I reacquaint with Grief, another stodgy old raven wearing black. He is silent, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting, sitting by my office door, whispering, "Nevermore."
 
 
Have you experienced a miscarriage before or after your loss? How did the grief differ? How was it the same? Did the expectation of loss help with the reality of it? If you have only suffered from one loss or none, how do you abide with others in this community who suffer from multiple losses, or who have not suffered from multiple losses? How do you feel Grief stalks you? Like a raven or a hawk?

 

The Most

When do you miss him the most? Lu asked me last night.

"Alone in the car," I replied.

When I can't listen to the radio for another second and I'm tired of all the music I have and I'm just driving along quietly and my mind starts to turn, I feel him not-there so powerfully it makes me choke.

In the first months and years after he died driving alone in the car was when I cried the most.  A new story about pregnancy, or that perfectly placed Modest Mouse tune, it would annihilate me and the car was the perfect capsule to scream as loud as I needed.

It is also why I will never, ever put up one of those fucking Baby On Board signs.  I wasn't planning on running you off the road, but since you're rubbing it in my face maybe I should!?  Strange that they don't make a dead baby sticker to add to those insanely annoying sticker families, either.  Also, get out of the fast lane and learn how to drive!  My typical rant makes Lu laugh.

What about you? I asked her, serious again.

"When we're around other kids, friend's kids, that would have been the same age as him.  I always miss him, but that's when it's the worst."

Yeah, I agreed.  Absolutely.

Three year old boys just becoming little guys with their dads running around the yard or walking down the street as alive and independent as only three year olds can be.  I remember pieces of what it was like to be that age, but I will have no memories of Silas at this age.  He vanishes to shadow every time I glance toward him.

In the evening, alone, I feel more alone for missing him, for never knowing him.  The constructs and inventions to heal a day are insufficient to make sense of why we can't share the world with him.

His death added a bone in my body lengthwise through my heart, sliced my liver in two, blew my innocent vision to smithereens, twisted my ankles unwalkable, trapped my breath in poisoned lungs.  I'm not the same person I was before Silas and that kinda sucks 'cause I kinda liked who I was.

More importantly, I was very much looking forward to who Silas was going to transform me into. (insert bitter laughter)

I am transformed absolutely but not at all how I wanted.

To be so wrong about how I thought things were going to go is profoundly undermining. What else will I get wrong?  What other traumas await down the road?  How can I trust myself to make any choices, to have any expectations about the future when his absence is devastating proof of how utterly foolish I could be?

Even worse is Silas's transformation from life to death.  From potential to memory with barely a stop in between.  From ours here to love and cherish and hold, to dust we cannot hug.

A thin, young, sliver of tree quivers in the evening breeze, under the stars of his name and they remind me silently of the never-ending-quiet blasting from his vanished lungs.

When do we miss him the most?  

Always we reply in unison.  Always.

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

Are there certain instances or particular experiences that most remind you of your lost child or children?  Has that changed over time?  Are there new moments that catch you by surprise?

nothing to be afraid of . . . . .

When I was eighteen I had a premonition.

She was standing across the bar from me. In a student union. Not a student. Not a teenager. Something about her posture was crushed. Tiny fractures in her vertebrae. But I didn't recognise grief when I was eighteen. Because I was lucky and stupid.

We were loud back then. Or we were quiet. Boasting with ideas. Or clinging to the wall, hoping to pass unnoticed.

Our thoughts so predictable that you could probably have written them out on a blackboard and counted out the nodding dogs. Insecurity and hubris and hormones. But hers were unreadable.

She was slight with a cloud of dark hair. She drank only water. Her eyes were wide but she seemed to be looking somewhere other than where she happened to be at the time. Sinking or rising to a parallel, near the ceiling or just above the floorboards. Disconnected, in a far off place. She looked mildly upon us. Occasionally her expression was kind. At other times, I suspected, less so.

I almost spoke to her once. Out of curiosity. But, before I approached, I asked someone why she came here, to our bar.

 "Her baby died," was the reply. Apparently her baby had died at the hospital around the corner. In the inner city, it's hard to disentangle places for death and places for entertainment. Perhaps that bar was as close as she could bear to get.

I felt relief wash over me.  That I hadn't spoken to her. Because now, now I was afraid of her.

How sad. Eighteen year old me, you were so stupid. You were afraid of a mother and a little baby. You were afraid of love, afraid of death. How silly. You can't outrun those two, even with eighteen year old legs. If you are a human, those two will chase you down, no matter how fast you run. 

I don't even know if this story was true. I never did speak to that lady in the end. A dead baby is one of those convenient explanations rolled out for anyone acting a little oddly. The handy urban myth. Her baby died. His baby died. An instant and, supposedly, plausible explanation for all sort of scary and strange behaviour. 

Because we're frightening. All of us here. Their worst nightmare.

Altogether now . . . .  

RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

****

I emailed a friend this autumn. About how the Halloween themed October page on my cupcake calendar was really pissing me off. It was a cupcake with a gravestone on the top. Hmmmm. Death. Is it cute and yummy? Or scary and associated with ghouls and monsters? Is death frightening? Or is it something appetising and edible? Trivial or taboo? Awful or nothing to be afraid of?

Photograph by Maria Olejniczak

***

Just after Jessica, my surviving daughter, came home from hospital, a film came out on release in British cinemas and was trailed extensively on television. I came to hate this film, 'The Unborn.' Can you guess where this is heading? Something a bit spooky and unsettling appears to be happening? Check. Is there a hysterical woman? Check. You can bet they'll be a dead baby at the bottom of this one. And, let's face it, the title is a bit of a giveaway.

A young woman discovers she was (is) a twin. Her brother died in utero. And now she is haunted by the dead twin? Possibly? I'm not entirely sure from the rather confused plot synopsis I just looked up via Google and, for obvious reasons, I wasn't queuing up to see this film.

Because there is nothing like the repetitive screening of a trailer for a horror film to sneak up on you and remind you of what your life has turned into.

**** 

This strange dichotomy seems to put us in a bit of a bind. We are scary but we must also remain meek. Something to scream at that must also creep about, quiet as a mouse. 

We are terrifying. What has happened to us is so awful that it is wheeled out as an explanation for a multitude of sins. It is a frequently used plot device, the dead baby. It has been written about at Glow before, by far better writers than me, please see this wonderful post of Tash's here. Arson? Drinking too much? Suicide? Even, as in one extremely popular British soap opera, stealing someone else's baby? The motive? Yup. That's right. A dead baby.  

As someone with my very own, extremely personal, dead baby, I do sometimes wonder what people think of me. Do they think I'm eyeing up their babies, ready to make my snatch? That I'm drinking from secret bottles of gin secreted about my house? Crazily cackling over my box of matches? I know it's been a while since my daughter died but there is still time for the crazies isn't there? But, in reality, all I do is love her and miss her. And sigh quietly.

A fictitious dead baby stands in for unspeakable horror, an explanation for the most erratic and strange behaviour. One that might even afford the perpetrator some sympathy (although don't bet on that, poor baby-snatching-lady from the soap didn't get much here in the media) a real, honest-to-goodness, true life dead baby seems to be a different proposition. When they stop being a plot device and become a real child. My daughter, Georgina, who I loved and cared about. Not a handy explanation or short hand for why I'm so screwed up. It is, apparently, less easy to discuss her than it is a made up baby on a soap opera. I've had entire conversations about the dead-baby-mama-turned-baby-snatcher plot with people who have never once mentioned my own daughter. Although I know that they know that I have a personal interest in this storyline.

We don't talk about that. If this happens to you in real life you'd better not become unhinged. You can't even get away with being slightly angry in some quarters. Don't yell, don't even whisper. Don't tell anyone your feelings or you will be giving too much away. Bad enough that your baby died. Don't talk about it for heaven's sake. Don't have any feelings about it. Don't, whatever you do, write on the internet about it. Just keep quiet.

Scary. Scary and silent. Silent about the very thing that makes us scary. An odd corner to be painted into. One that I'm uncomfortable in.

Do you think that 'joe public' finds us scary? Do you ever feel scary?

 What are your feelings about the 'dead baby' plot device, that favourite of literature and film?

Why is talk about strong emotions, death, love or anything that really matters, so very unfashionable? Or is that just in the circles in which I move? For the purposes of full disclosure, I'm 32, British and move in circles composed of mothers with young children and/or people who like numbers and databases. Is it different where you are?