other women

The groom’s sister looks pale and smiles wanly. Her black cocktail dress fits trimly over her belly; she looks six, maybe seven, months along. In the reception hall she is seated alone across the table from me. Her place setting is adorned with a small white candle and a photo in a black felt frame— her father, who died a few years ago. 

I happen to know that hers is an IVF baby. That she is 39, single, and has decided to parent alone. Her grief is so palpable and familiar—alone with sadness at a happy event— that I find myself wondering if this is her first pregnancy attempt, or if there is a loss in her past, or if her baby has complications. She looks so ethereally sad for someone whose brother is getting married. Maybe she just misses her dad.

I should ask her. This new, compassionate me, who is supposedly unafraid of grief, should ask, How are you really doing? But I don’t. I make small talk. I am embarrassed.

I am faking this wedding. I am going to have a good time, dammit. One of my best friends is getting married, the banquet hall full of old acquaintances, and I just want to pretend I am okay. So I do. For the first time I put a huge parenthesis around my dead baby and prattle on about my beautiful stepdaughter, my great new husband, our upcoming move, and how beautiful the bride looks. This is how I get through it. This is how I have a good time.

Later I regretted this portrait of my life. Not because I hid my baby daughter—there isn’t a person in the room who meant enough for me to share her name with them. But because of the other women I might have wounded with my fakery. Because in that moment I chose to continue the cycle, chose not to break the silence.

At the wedding, I try to be cheerful with Alice, who is spending the evening at the edge of the terrace, the edge of the ballroom, the edge of the crowd. She is fidgety with an angry look on her face. Her very tall husband smiles at everyone, mingles, brings her drinks. I’ve met her only once, at a shower she threw for the bride. There she let something slip about how painful fertility testing is. I see the look on her face tonight and wonder. How many losses? How far long? How many failed cycles? How many bad test results? To me, she looks like grief.

photo by laura mary

When I approach her, she barely responds. Her husband swoops in with drinks. Conversation falters. We end up chatting about my stepdaughter and her adventures at summer camp. This is stupid, given what I know. I want to say, How is the testing going? It’s okay to talk to me. I know something about this. But I don’t. I smile and mention Lilly’s name too many times. Finally, we sidle away from one another. But I watch her all night.

Later I find Nissa, a vivacious Filipina in her late 40s with a poet for a husband. I used to pal around with her and the bride, but that was years ago. She wants to catch up and hear my news. I tell her I am a stepmama, and that I am about to move to her old stomping grounds in the west of the state. Her husband points out that they grow good weed there, not that he’s tried it. We laugh.

As I speak, she hears happiness in my voice. She doesn’t hear the parenthesis. So you like being a parent?, she asks. Oh, that is so great, oh…. She looks up at her husband, and I see the pain cross her face. They have never been able to have children. And now I am the jerk, bragging about “my child” to the childless. I could have told her then about Angel Mae. She would have been kind about it, but it would have felt like backtracking. See I am not really a jerk because my baby died and I haven’t been able to get pregnant again either…

But at that moment, I don’t know how to say it. She is wearing a bridesmaid dress and has a champagne glass in her hand.

Jane is on the dance floor. I haven’t seen her since college. She moved to Colorado, then Paris, then back to the Southwest. She is lively and nerdy and gorgeous, just as I remember her. It has always been hard to get a negative word out of her; she smiles broadly even as she tells me about rupturing her Achilles tendon a week before her wedding. The kids are doing great, she says, total opposites in personality, though. Her younger one is adopted.

I could ask why they chose to adopt. I wonder about losses and secondary infertility. I look for answers in her face, but she is still smiling and grooving as Prince’s Seven blares loudly from the speakers. Maybe she adopted simply because she was adopted herself.

She asks if I am on Facebook. I tell her I used to be but not anymore. Why not? I dodge the question.

Maybe this is just me, seeing loss everywhere. Maybe these women felt fine and could have cared less what I rambled about. Maybe I should mind my own business. Maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t make myself into the crazy dead baby lady at the wedding.

Maybe. But I’m pretty sure I’m right about this—that at such a happy occasion, there were sad hearts wandering the ballroom. So I’m still thinking about those women, wishing I had spoken up, wishing we could each have felt a little less alone. But silence was my survival that night. Maybe it was theirs, too.

* * * * * * * *

These days, how are you with other people’s pain and grief (hidden or revealed)? Has your own loss made you bolder about being with others who are hurting? What is it like when you say the wrong thing, or nothing? Have you ever publicly broken the “time and place” rules because you needed to talk?

it's all in the delivery

I've been working very closely with a woman who is about 32 weeks pregnant. Right around the time she found out she was expecting she also found out she is diabetic.  Naturally, our conversations all tend to end up about babies, pregnancy, the risks and hopes involved.  I didn’t tell her about Sadie until we’d passed about six months this way.

By text.

I kind of cringe just remembering it. I had taken a few days off of work unexpectedly because of a particularly bad time – sleeplessness, low moments, etc. One of the extended dark periods that, thankfully, happen less and less these days. It went something along the lines of, “I’m not sure if you know this, but this Really Bad Thing happened to us about two years ago, etc.” 

I rank it on the awkward scale alongside those instances when some asshole goes on and on asking me why I don’t have children, and how I should really have children, because children, you know they’re the best thing to ever happen to you.  And in my mind every time I scream at him that I know all of that and more, including what it’s like to have your entire concept of what life means ripped away in the instant you watch your precious child die.

In person it usually goes a little differently.

This time I was the asshole.  Her response came back much later, very oh my god I’m so sorry I’ve been talking all this time is my pregnancy affecting you oh my god I’m so sorry, etc. etc and etc. 

Eventually, after a bit of a clumsy transition, our conversations morphed to include my experience with pregnancy, birth, newborns. She asks me questions that never include the how or why, but seek advice about gas and air or the trials of breastfeeding instead.  And I’m content with that.  I am a mother too, after all.

I probably could have gone on without ever telling her.  But that day it just felt so overwhelming, keeping up the act.  The fact that there was this huge big part of me that I wasn’t being honest about – especially something that affects me so profoundly – just got to be too much.  I feel as though I’m doing Sadie an incredible injustice when I don’t acknowledge her, purely to save other people from being uncomfortable. There is a time and place for most things, of course. But I can’t make a habit of avoiding the truth about this little person who changed my life forever with her own painfully short one.

And now this woman and I have moved on. Maybe it helps explain me more. I’m sure it reminds her how precious a gift she’s been given. 

.::.

What about you? Do you immediately share your story when someone asks you if you have children, or how many you have?



"thank you all for coming"

Our support group meets on the second Wednesday of every month.  At one meeting, held in the cramped upstairs of the local church, the power failed.  The facilitator lit a candle and placed it in the center of the group.  Sitting in a circle, we mourned our children and one another’s by candlelight as the summer night drove the oxygen out of the room and the shadows higher and higher up the wall. 

This meeting was auspicious.  It was the first in which M. and I were not the group's newest members.  Two new couples had joined, starting me and M. down the path to veteran-hood.  As each member of the circle told her story, one of the newcomers would interject, interrupt, and break in: her thirst to be understanding and to be understood so deep and parching, no amount of relating could slake it.  The other new mother, having shared her story, said very little.  She just looked around the room, listening, maybe searching our shadowed faces for what she will look like three months, ten months, two years down the timeline.

After that night, the group moved back to the upstairs library of a nearby synagogue.  We are surrounded by books with titles like The Long War and Sands of Sorrow.  Joy and Remembrance and We Had a Dream.  And Babi Yar, which looks like Baby every time I light upon its spine.  At each meeting, I hope there will be no new members.  Every time there are, it is a reminder of a hard and disorienting fact: that after your babies die, and while you are at this point or that in the grieving process, other people’s babies die, too.  This throws a hard light onto at least one self-deception of the bereaved: the world has not, in fact, stopped.  It is spinning right along.  Grief just makes you forget the motion for a little while—so long as you don’t happen upon other people as they are hurled over the side.

When M. and I were new to the group, maybe this is what we meant to the longer-standing members.  I know when I first see the new initiates, that is what they mean to me.  At the same time M. and I were say, driving to Phoenix, or walking in San Diego, or beginning therapy, or realizing how near the due date was, someone else was just then experiencing that first something’s-wrong punch of terror, crying their first anguished cry, or watching a little casket descend, rocking in the breeze like a bassinette, just as Gus’s and Zoey’s did.  

Listening to the newcomers tell their stories, repeating ours, hearing the further-along members share the new, surprising shapes their pain has taken, I came to see that we are not a portrait of grief.  We are a telescopic view. 

Seeing where the new members are in their mourning and recognizing in where they are now a place you once were—this is not looking in a mirror; it is looking back in time.  It is to peer through a lens into deep space, to see a cataclysm as great as the distance its light has crossed.  It is to try to reconcile its fundamental gone-ness with its vital now-ness.  And it bends the mind, because how could anything so violent and so exquisite, be the past?  It is to see the after-effects of the Big Bang: not happening now of course, but to all appearances absolutely now. 

This is as fitting an image as any, the Big Bang.  It was a calamity that birthed a universe and forever veiled what existed before—hiding it not only from sight but also from imagining.  Ask any of us there in that upstairs libary, each of us intimate with who the others have become, but still strangers to who they had been: what were our children’s deaths if not that? 

What experiences have you had “mentoring” babyloss parents or with support groups?  How did the experience of being a more established member of the community differ from being a newer one? 

Simple

I miss him.  All the time, every day.  It's just part of who I am now.  Missing Silas is what I do while I'm doing everything else.

Almost 2 years now and my grief has certainly changed in many ways, but there is a core aspect to it that has not transformed at all.  I have transformed around it, even though you'd have to look hard to see it.

I talk to lots of people all day between my two very social jobs and none of them would ever know or suspect the pain that lives in my heart all the time.  It almost makes me smile now, that pain.  It's my little secret with my little missing son.

I'm a father who doesn't have to do a thing, has no responsibilities, with no expectations and no chance to fuck anything up.  Or, at least, fuck up anything else.  Really wish he and I got off to a better start.  Instead here I am and there he isn't.  A nightmare fatherhood in a disaster of a life.

Yet somehow I manage to laugh these days.  Time is inexorable and all I can do is forge straight ahead and try to stay upright.  Without laughter, without humor, I would have given up long ago.  Laughter is one of the few things that pierces my persistent sadness.

Music;  Love;  Delicious food and drink;  The raw beauty of the world around me;  The faces of my friends and family;  Silence in the night when I'm on the couch with a book I cannot put down; Lu's lips on mine.  Sadness succumbs to all of these, for a time.

I miss him and I'm trying hard not to miss life itself.

I'm sure you all feel like this:

There is no one else in the world like me.  And you're right.  The unique razor edges of your grief is like a deadly snowflake, the peaks and valleys of your emotions your own personal fingerprint of doom.  We are each alone in the ongoing experience of our individual losses and it is easy to feel so vastly different than everyone else when everyone else around us has no idea how deep this pain goes.

Or maybe they do, I sometimes remind myself.  Everyone has their own story, their own pain, their own raging lament at the injustice of life.  Maybe they are hiding just as much anguish, just in different sector of their soul.  The litany of disaster is easy to recite and difficult to deny, for any of us.

Every day is denial here.  Denial of depression.  Denial of apathy.  Denial of how easy it would be to just give up and lay down and never get up again.  It doesn't feel possible, that we can keep going even though we are getting smacked down month after month after month but yet here I am, not giving up.

There is a strange sort of inevitability to behaving like this, for me.  I don't really feel like giving up is even a choice.  It just seems so... boring and listless.  I don't think I could stand it, just sitting around with my given-up self all the time.  I already know what a complete jackass that version of myself is, and I couldn't bear to spend any amount of time with me behaving like that.

Besides, I've been all the way to the bottom and it's a scary fucking place.  Walls, floors, windows, faces, food, sounds, scents, they all stopped making any sense at all and I could feel the ease of oblivion close by.  I still don't quite understand how my body managed to function in those first days after he died.  I shouldn't have been able to swallow or breathe.  I shouldn't have been able do anything at all and yet, still, again, somehow, here I am with a little smile on my face confessing to the fact that I can go on living even though my son is dead.

It shouldn't be possible in so many ways, but the simple fact of his death is a proof of the geometry of life.  It is something that is absolutely true in a world that is filled with gray areas and half-lies.  There's no way to hide from it.  No way to reason with it.  No way to change it or fix it or alter it in any way.  It is simple.  It is final.  It is true.  He's dead.  I'm alive.  And now I get to spend the rest of my time here trying to reconcile those 2 truths even though they are perpendicular lines --true forms-- that intersected once and never will again.  Or at least, not in this world.

Part of me went with him.  Part of him stayed with me.  Now it is an impenetrable nugget that lives inside me that is impossible to explain.  It is a single point of existence, a raw, elemental dot that is painful and compelling and beautiful and terrible.  His death is not just a moment, not just a period of time in my life, rather it is an ongoing experience that continues to alter my entire life and everyday experience.

Ah, sirens in the street, right outside the house just like that day when he died.  It is always that day, now, for a little while.  Then time pulls me forward and I miss him and I miss who I could have been and the only way out is to push all of that back inside me.  I push it back into a single, simple point of truth and loss.  Then I focus directly on right now, right in front of me, whatever it is that has to happen next.  I will do it because doing nothing is worse than anything.  Doing nothing is too simple.  Doing nothing is a denial of his life, as brief and unfulfilled as it was.

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

Do you still have a sense of humor?  What makes you laugh?  What do you do to stay upright?  What are the simple truths that you hold on to?

afraid of the dark

photo by Jenny Kristina Nilsson.

I feel small. Alone.
 
It is suddenly upon me. Takes hold of me. I am a small molting creature. I want to crawl under something. Or play dead. Or turn the exact shade of my bed covers. I kick my legs and turn over. Then turn over again. It is always night when I feel this weight on me, or rather all the skin off of me. Always night when I become terrified of mortality. Mine. Yours. My parent's. My children's. And then the fear turns to some kind of vortex in the time-space continuum. Time folds in on itself, across my year and into old age. I no longer feel, in those moments, as though I am thirty-six, but I gag on that withered end-of-life taste. I can smell the sweet orange cleaner that covers old age. And see myself wanting to believe in something. Life seems so fucking fast now. My kids and their kids are going to be old before I can even process how amazing their youth is.
 
I existed in a miniature terrarium before Lucy died. It was a self-constructed sterile world with plastic signs that read, "This is your home. Nothing can hurt you here."

I can see beyond the glass now. It was rather silly to begin with, surrounding myself with moss and other tiny soft things. I didn't realize I was doing it, after all. I just sought comfort, like any animal.  I thought I was a Buddhist. I thought I was an existentialist. I thought I was an existentialist Buddhist. Death. Life. Mortality. Morality. There was some bullshit zen place I felt I had gotten with death. Death happens. To everyone. I thought I made peace with that. Until someone so loved and daughterly died inside of me. Then I realized I was only prepared for other people's deaths, not my own or my own child's death.

:::

After Lucy died, tectonic plates shifted in me. Whole continents of me are no longer flat. My body navigates the outside world and then my new and ever-changing internal landscape. First, twisting and moving around other people's fears of death and child loss, and then, of course, charting a course through my own. I have become terrified of gravity. Plagues rest right over the horizon, ready to capture my children. Even Daddy-wrestling seems wrought with portent and disaster. The most pedestrian of activities have become the potential for the most dramatic of endings.

A small green plaque now reads at the base of me:

The Caution Mountains.
Elevation: Not High Enough to Hurt Yourself.

The truth is I cannot protect anyone from death. We are all going to die. We don't know when and we don't know where. And it makes all of this impossibly oppressive. We all know this, but did I really know it? Did I really understand that? Not until Lucy died and I held her small, lifeless body and wished it warm again.

If I needed to pick one word to describe grief for me, it would be fear.

Fear of death. Fear of disaster. Fear of the unknown. Fear of others. Fear of myself. Fear of the market. Middle of the night fear. Shaking fear.  Fear that feels like the dysentery. Fear that feels like indifference and apathy. Fear that feels foolish. Fear that does not resemble a labyrinth, but rather the exact opposite--a maze with no outs.

No matter how much bubble wrap I had, I could not have kept you safe, daughter.

This fear isn't debilitating. In fact, it is so functional and so understandable, I allow it to exist without medication. "You are afraid," I say, "because your daughter died. You are afraid because you don't want anyone else to die. You are afraid because you don't want to die. You are afraid because you have seen person ash and it is not clean and smooth and easy, it is lumpy and different colors and includes someone you loved more than the sun. And the others are afraid too. It is normal to be afraid."

So much of who I was died the day Lucy died. Not just the happy one, the non-grieving Angie, but the secure one, the peaceful one, the one who wasn't afraid of shadows and boogey-men. The existentialist Buddhist one.

In the past eighteen months I have talked about these two people with my name--the Old Me and the New Me. By the sounds of it, the Old Me is a pretty terrific person. The Old Me was pretty. Kind. Light on her feet. An athlete even. She was a positive person.  A non-grudge holder. She meditated and practiced ahimsa. The Old Me remembered your birthday. The Old Me was striving for selflessness and enlightenment. She sat with discomfort for wisdom. The Old Me was funny without being bitter and sad. The Old Me talked about your stuff with you. She was a good listener. The Old Me also wore crazy earrings. You would have liked her.

The New Me is bitter. Angst-y. The New Me is a sad person. Defeated. The New Me is afraid. She is anxious, biting her nails and pacing. Up late at night thinking about things she cannot change. The New Me doubts. Often. Constantly, even. She doubts her abilities as a parent. She doubts her diligence in everything. She doubts her beliefs and unbeliefs. She doubts truths. She doubts justice. She doubts knowledge. She doubts herself.

The Old Me/New Me dichotomy is cruel, because I was never that great, nor am I that horrible. It is also a lie. This is just all me. Me. This is just me grieving. This is me soul happy, but body sad. This is me afraid. This is me parenting two live children and a dead one. The truth of it is most of the world saw the commercial of me. The me with make-up on, drinking a bourbon on the rocks, laughing at irreverence, riffing on a story with an old friend. I was selling an idea of me. That was me socializing. A very different me. This is the rather unchangeable borderline agoraphobic me trying to figure out how to live this life without my child.

What one word would you pick to describe your grief? How has anxiety manifested itself in you after the death of your child or children? How do you deal with your middle of the night anxieties? Do you believe that there is an old and new you? What is the new you like?

all kinds of honouring: how to plan a baby's funeral

There. There it is, a title shed of euphemisms, because I want someone out there who is desperate and lonely and grief stricken to find us immediately with a search engine.

It's a horrible thing to contemplate, but those of us who read here have had to do it -- have had to think about what to do now, what to do next, even if the answer was "Nothing."

Our ways of dealing with death are various, as are our glances backwards at the whole process. Would we have done it differently? Did something go wrong then, too? Do we have regrets? Did someone give us incomplete information? Would we have asked more questions had we been less in shock? Was there anything we wish we had known?

Or was the horrible experience as perfect as it could have been? Was it meaningful and powerful? Was it redemptive and constructive? Did anyone shock you with kindness or simply shock you with mere understanding of death itself?

Today we add a permanent piece to the cabin library, over there on the left side, on funeral planning. The experiences of just the contributors are varied, and we hope helpful to those coming to find information and company. As with anything we write here, our words are magnified and enriched by our readers' comments and we hope you find time to go and add your experience over there so that others might be strengthened and find some common ground. I think it's always helpful to know that whatever it is you're going through and thinking, you're not alone.

When you have time and inclination, please go comment and add your experience to the permanent record.