this cup pass from me

I am carrying a child who is almost precisely the gestational age her brother was when he was born.  And when he died.  And this is scaring the shit out of me.

26 weeks, 1 day is actually pretty decent for a micropreemie.  They told me Finn had at least a 75% chance of survival without major complications, statistically...even if he was a white male fetus, that most vulnerable creature of the species.

I have learned, more viscerally than any professor could ever have hammered through my skull had I actually braved such a subject in my studies, that statistics lie.  Or that only fools believe they will come out on the positive end of them, at least.  He did have major complications, ones that proved insurmountable, fatal.  Despite steroid shots, his lungs collapsed.  One so severely that they tubed him directly through his skin, through his tender, papery flesh and the tissue of his tiny ribcage.  I do not even know if there was anesthesia...I was ten rooms away, trying to recover some feeling in my legs and a blood pressure reading high enough to qualify as alive, to prove to the nurses that I could stand so that they'd let me hop in a wheelchair and go to him.  When we finally won that fight and were ushered to his incubator, the wounds of his own battle were already vivid upon him.  His little fingertips and toes were blackened from lack of oxygen, and his chest had been cut, his throat tubed.  Before his mama ever held him.  Before there was ever a gentle touch or a voice that spoke his name.

Then we did hold his hand, and he squeezed our fingers, and we stroked his little feet and marvelled at him, and in the end hours upon hours later when the outcome of the battle was undeniable we surrendered and unplugged him and held him and tried to fit a lifetime of love and comfort into one last hour, before he was gone.  We were lucky, beyond measure, to have that time. And he was medicated, probably more than I even realized, so I do not think there was pain for him at the end.  I allow myself to think that.  I need to think that.

But for the longest time the rest, those brutal early hours, were something I simply did not allow myself to think about at all, because there was this primal cry that would rise in my throat and choke me.  Because my baby, my tiny baby, had been born to a shock and suffering that even now I know I only know the half of.  Because that was the first of his brief hours of life.  And because it was me who enabled it to be that way, me who made the decision, at 26 weeks exactly, that we would rescind our previous "no heroics" designation and go all out to save the baby I believed by then could be saved.

I don't exactly think I made the wrong decision...that's not why I lie here in a cold sweat before dawn some mornings.  The odds were that he might have survived and thrived.  I would, I think, have felt worse had we done nothing and lost a baby who might otherwise have come through okay.  And I don't exactly feel guilt, because I made the decision without guile and on the basis of the best advice I could get at the time.   But owning that decision and the pain that it - that I - caused that tiny boy will sit with me, part of me, until the day I die.  It is, if I am honest with myself, the cruellest thing I have ever caused to happen to another human being, no matter my intentions, my investment, the depths of my love.  And what wakens me in the thin light of 4:30 am these days, heart pounding, is the fear that sometime in the next week or two I may have to face it again, to choose again.

Choice is often and in many ways a privilege.  When you have no real control over the outcome of your choices, though, it can feel like a mockery, like a bitter joke.

They ask me if I want the steroid shots and I say, i don't know and I cast my eyes around the room like a trapped animal, wondering hell, do i look like i'm writing this story, like i'm in charge here?  The truth is if my cervix is showing significant weakness of course I want them NOW and if it's not I want to wait because they are most effective when given within two weeks of delivery and preferably after 28 weeks but sometimes it's weak and soft and sometimes it's not, that tricksy cervix.  The truth is these same practices have taken far less significant decisions out of my hands in the past, in the crises of labour, so the fact that they defer to me on this Big Thing just leaves me wary, puzzled.  The truth is they don't know what's going to happen and I don't know what's going to happen and I don't want control of Big Decisions in this liminal boundary zone because I know it is a fool's game. 

I am chickenshit, burnt crispy.  I want to abdicate.

The little life that hangs in the balance...for my own sake, sure, I want her at all costs.  But for hers?  That is the road I do not seem to know how to walk this time, the road I wish I could close my eyes to and ignore until it is safely past and I get to believe, maybe, that I will not have to choose again whether or not my child's brief life will be one of pain and machines and invasive procedures, until we reach a place where I can breathe and hope that I will get to play mother this time, not hapless, impotent god.

I whisper, please.  give me a few more weeks, and i'll happily pretend that I'm bossing you around for the rest of my life.  

Memento Mori

In addition to the box of ashes in my family room, and the unkempt dusty pile of cards tied with ribbon, a padded manila envelope containing a pink blanket, and other hospital detritus and paraphernalia, I have:

-- a lilac bush (gift)
-- a tree in a park (gift)
-- a bracelet
-- hopefully this year, a bench in a local, green setting

Of course I need none of this to remember that my daughter died, but sometimes I like the feeling of tending to something, or having something physical to look at.  Sometimes I just appreciate the bolt of remembrance at an odd time, like standing in line at the grocery store and finding myself studying my bracelet.  Other times I'm rather stunned that I've been watering the lilac for a week and not really thought about the back story, or driven by the park without a glance at the tree, or completely forgotten about the deeper purpose of the jewelery on my wrist and worn it like one would an old watch.

When I first began wearing my bracelet, I thought it was so big, so shiny that it would be impossible not to notice it every waking minute.  I can now go days without realizing I'm wearing it.  It's become a part of me, like the watch or the wedding band, that's just there.  The lilac is now a small bush, but I found myself this week paying far more attention to what kind of pansies I'm going to plant on the corner in front of it this fall.  I don't think it's forgetting, nor do I think it's accepting.  I think it's a matter of my life encircling these objects, and my grief becoming an everyday, commonplace downward glance.  

I tried to think of a simile for how I'm growing used to the strangeness of my grief and the momentoes that litter my life -- a missing limb?  An extra digit?  and the first thing that sprung to my mind was the calmness with which I moved through the baby flotsam of Bella's life, until I was nonplussed to discover a sippy in my purse, or an ABC magnet on my laundry machine.  I guess it's just like this.  What are now everyday objects occasionally pierce my consciousness to remind me of a daughter, and how the routines and symbols of my life have changed around them both.

Whadya you got?

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? 

Layers

I don't remember what I was wearing that day. I remember my long black winter coat because before I left I asked Monkey for a hug. But I don't remember what I was wearing under it, what I must've seen all day as I caught sight of myself-- my sleeves as I typed, my pants as I sat down, my belly as I balanced the laptop on my lap while I waited for Monkey at gymnastics that afternoon or as I waited for the kicks that never came that night. I remember the dinner I ate as I tried to coax those kicks, but I don't remember what the shirt was that covered the belly on which I balanced the plate. I remember that the radio was on as I drove to the hospital, and I remember that I thought the program was interesting, but I can no longer remember what it was about. Now that I know that the full moon was in fact supposed to be there, I can verify that the memory that started knocking on my brain's door recently, of the full disc as I drove, wasn't a figment of my imaginataion fabricated later on-- I really did see it. But I don't remember what I was wearing. Not as far as anyone else could see, at least.

I remember what I was wearing under my shirt. A bellybra, that wonderful contraption that distributes the weight of the belly over the whole back, making it much easier to function. Even if I didn't rememeber, this detail I could reconstruct, as I never went a day without it the last couple of months of A's pregnancy. But I do actually rememeber. I remember because the nurse asked me about it as she was preparing the probe to look for the heart beat. I gave her a glowing review, and she said she needs to remember it for next time because her back was killing her the last couple of months with her first-- what with being on her feet all day. I wonder, given what happened in the next 5 minutes, does she remember it now?

When I first discovered that I couldn't remember what I was wearing I thought of it as a good thing-- next time around, I reasoned, I wouldn't have bad associations with any of my maternity clothes, I could wear all of them again. Except for that bellybra, of course.

I am 28 weeks 4 days along today. If you come to my house, I doubt you can miss the belly. And yet, when I am out and about, I still wear a shawl. Unless it's over 90 degrees outside, and then I put on this net-like thing that goes over my head, is long, and a bit shiny, but is far less of a  disguise, though it still makes me feel a little covered, a little protected.  I waddle, by the way. Thanks to the pelvic pain that makes it hard to walk straight. So I waddle, and the belly sticks out farther then the boobs, and has for a couple of weeks now. And still I insist on having something that gives me some illusion of maybe fooling someone out there.

At first I thought that the shawls were my protection against the stupid that is out there, against the untouched who think a pregnant belly equals a live healthy baby 40-X  weeks from now. I didn't want to talk to them. I didn't want to deal with their "congratulations" and their "is this your first?"s. I didn't want to give them an opportunity to tell me all about their utterly normal life where assumptions of invincibility hold. A bit later I understood that I was also avoiding having to tell people that I am not jumpy and comfy because the baby before this one died. I didn't want to have to tell the story, anew.

It's a weird thing, really. I want people to know about A. How few people know that he existed used to be one of the biggest crazy-makers in my head. It's better now, the crazy is, but this particular thought is still sad to me. It seems, though, that I need to control the context in which I want people to learn. I don't know that it is even possible, but I seem to want to introduce him in some way that isn't all about pain. I want people to see that the pain is there because of how much we love him, how much we wanted him, how much we miss him now.

I remember, so very vividly, being pregnant with A, out and about with Monkey, and conscious of how lucky we were and of how much our luck can hurt to look at. I was thinking of infertiles at the time, but boy can a sight like this hurt a dead baby mama's heart.  I remember, too, last spring seeing pregnant bellies and babies wherever I turned my head. A veritable sea of happy that had no room for me. I started coping by making up sad stories for these happy people I saw on the street-- this one had five miscarriages before this baby, that one needed an IVF or three. I knew, even as I was making up these stories that they can't all be true. But that was what I needed to do to be able to navigate the world around me.

Recently some of the dead baby bloggers have been confessing to having a hard time with other people's pregnancies.  Is it any wonder? And what I realized, reading these bloggers, is that my shawls are a little about all of you too. If I can help it, if I can help it at all, I don't want to add to your hurt. I don't want to, as Bon so aptly put it, stab you with my roundness.

My sister is getting married this weekend. My parents arrived a few days ago and other family is about to descend on us in mere hours. To some degree, I have been measuring this pregnancy in intervals of and between significant events. For the last few weeks I have been terrified that this baby would die before the wedding, adding new layers of terrible to what would be horrific any day all on its own.  Before that I was similarly scared he would not make it through the week Monkey and JD spent in the Old City. 

That Monday, Memorial Day in fact, I wan't feeling as much movement as I had been used to. I tried the water, and the couch, I tried this, that, and the other. And finally I couldn't handle it anymore, and I went in to triage. A friend of mine is a high risk OB in my practice, although he didn't start there until last summer. When I first heard that he was joining the practice, I thought I didn't want him to ever have anything to do with my care-- I didn't want him to have to feel bad if shit hit the fan again. But as I pressed the intercom button outside of triage that Monday, I saw my friend walking down the corridor. And suddenly I very much wanted him to be there. I was alone and scared, and not until that moment did I know how much I wanted to at least not be alone.

It is good to be a friend of the attending, let me tell you.  He brought the shiny new ultrasound machine, not the old clunker that told the doctor all those months ago that A was dead. He was gentle, and kind, and attentive, and exactly what I needed. He didn't just do the one peak to make sure the heart was beating-- he sat there for ten or fifteen minutes carefully studying everything, watching my son wiggle behind my anterior placenta that with its movement-cushioning ways was the likely culprit behind that day's freakout. Twenty more minutes on the monitor and one fine-looking strip later I walked out of the triage room next door to the one in which they told me A was dead. I was light-headed, shaken a little.  But I managed to only be ten minutes late for dinner with a friend. And the next morning I took a deep breath and pulled that bellybra out of the drawer.

When A died, six months seemed like a ridiculously long way off, like it should be enough time to close the gaping wound, to let my heart scar over.  And now, nearly a year and five months out, what I am wondering is whether there is ever an end to the layers left to uncover. I suspect not so much.

glowing in the woods: june 2008

It is a little hard to believe that yet another month had gone by, and it is time again to annouce our monthly "Glowing in the Woods" award! It was head-breaking to decide who gets the award--all these pieces are beautiful, poignant and touching. Each is a treasure you pick up and fondle and admire and have a hard time putting down. It is amazing how some find the words to those feelings we have been struggling to put our finger on.

This month we honour C. at My Resurfacing for Linus carries one, too -- an eloquent metaphor to the grief that bereaved parents feel. Wrap your heart around this post that is hard to tear away from.

Remember to nominate your favourites every month: posts that move you, resonate with you--posts we all need to share.

As mentioned last month, we are listing the nominees so you can all see how hard it is to choose who to give the award to. So much thanks to all who handed in nominations!

June's nominees:

Angie at Bring the Rain for Clay

Aite via Glow in the Woods for How to be there for your friend

Alice at An Empty Chair at our Table for Leagues of grief

Antigone at Antigone Lost for Hopeless