a great and noble life

I sit in the sanctuary. It is Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year on the Jewish calendar. The year when even the least observant Jew can be seen in a synagogue.

I am not the least observant Jew… Not really possible with a husband who is studying to become a rabbi. Not really possible with the amount of Jewish tradition I was raised with. Not really possible with Polish grandparents who survived the Holocaust. Not really possible with the number of Jewish food calories I have consumed in 38 years.

And yet it is still somewhat a surprise to me that I am there, in this synagogue, following along with this kind of service. It is a traditional Reform Jewish service. The prayer book – Gates of Repentance, special for this day of atonement – talks of

God as Lord,

God as male,

God as judging,

God as forgiving.

I can’t quite bring myself to recite along during the call and response. I can’t bring myself to say, God, oh Lord… out loud.

This is not how I relate to God, to Source, to all that is around and within me. This is not how I connect to my divine essence. Not in this language.

My “God” is not separate from me.

My “God” is not in charge, deciding what I will receive and what will be taken away, when I will struggle and when I will overcome.

My “God” does not judge or punish me.

My “God” does not care whether I fast on Yom Kippur, or that my fast today included drinks of water and kombucha, that my day of atonement included a trip to Whole Foods and time sitting on my couch writing in my journal and reading a (non-Jewish) book.

Then I find this in the prayer book during the afternoon service: 

This is the vision of a great and noble life:

To endure ambiguity and to make light shine through it;

To stand fast in uncertainty;

To prove capable of unlimited love and hope.

And it resonates inside.

Hmm… A great and noble life as one that is lived as well as possible in spite of its precariousness, in spite of our fragility. Amid the fuzzy blurred boundaries that keep changing on us without warning, and rugs that are pulled out suddenly from underneath us.

I have proven capable of unlimited love and hope. Each day I surprise myself that I continue to feel it even more. In spite of the uncertainty that comes with knowing that things can completely fall apart and come crashing down again and again.

I never before thought of my ability to bounce back as being a quality of a great and noble life. I never before related to survival that way. Yet survival is what it is, isn’t it? Isn’t that what I’ve been doing? Surviving? 

Or perhaps I have actually… been… thriving…?

***

It is later in the afternoon and the yizkor memorial service has begun. The mood is quiet and solemn and the passage is about our finiteness, words about being on the road towards death from the moment we are born. (I close off some when I hear the words birth and death in the same sentence.) Again I start leafing through the prayer book, unsatisfied with the gloom and doom.

I find this: 

May the pains of past bereavements grow more gentle;

Indeed, let them be transformed into gratitude to our dear ones who have died

And tenderness to those who are still with us.

I was so lost at this time last year. I was so angry… at everything and everyone. I cried through the entire day at our warm and wonderful Renewal congregation in Berkeley, surrounded by friends who were there at every turn to hug me and sit with me or leave me alone outside if I needed that. I didn’t fast. I felt no obligation, no inspiration.

I felt no connection to this day, so soon after Tikva had died. All I could do was picture her spinning in circles in a white dress, dancing to the music, a year later. The two of us together in a parallel universe where she had continued to live.

All I could do was cry an endless stream of angry lost tears.

Now, a year later, the pain has grown more gentle. I think of Tikva with gratitude for the gifts of hope and love she gave me, for the compassion space she cracked open and expanded within me. For asking me to love her in a way I had never before known I could love, for teaching me that hope never completely goes away, even when everything feels lost

Or finite.

And I think of Dahlia, who daily stretches my capacity for patience, who demands my presence, my tenderness like no one else can, who reminds me to laugh in my most frustrated and exhausted moments, and I feel gratitude for both of my daughters, the deepest kind of gratitude for the way things are.

Just as they are. 

***

I surprise myself, that I can feel this lightness, especially today. On this day that for many is solemn and serious, reflective and laden with guilt needing to be cleared and asking for forgiveness. I surprise myself that I feel anything other than rebelliousness about Yom Kippur, this holy day I was determined to mostly blow off this year.

Then I woke up this morning and felt peaceful, held. By an energy that is comforting, serene, gentle. It didn’t matter that I was not spending the day with my community back in California, but instead in my house and at the grocery store and at services that felt mostly foreign.

It didn’t matter that I hadn’t asked anyone’s forgiveness, nor made any big plans for ways I wanted to grow and expand in the coming year.

All that mattered was that when I stepped outside to watch four monarch butterflies and two fat bumblebees holding for dear life to the white flowers as the wind blew them furiously around, 

I felt connected… to all of it.

Connected to the wind, to the smells in the crisp fall air, to the bees and the butterflies, to the light streaming through their gold-orange wings…

Connected to Tikva. 

Connected to my essence, the most pure and true part of me.

Connected to a deep knowing inside me that I can and will continue believing in hope and love.

Perhaps the makings of a great and noble life are that simple.

.::.

And you? How do you connect with the part deep inside that is most entirely you? Is there something bigger that helps you feel connected? How have you stretched and expanded through losing your child? What makes you recoil, contract? What helps you to feel you are thriving? What are the makings of your great and noble life? 

the rising stars

I'm not sure how to do this, what to call it or how to get through it.  The anniversary of Silas' birth and death is on Friday which means I am a year deep into this nightmare and still mostly lost.

Our plan is to spend time away with my brother's family, up in New Hampshire.  Their house is cozy and safe, tucked onto a hillside in the midst of trees and trails, the canopy of stars endless above.

Orion NebulaIt's those fucking stars I'm worried about.  It was right around this time when we picked Orion as his middle name.  I've always loved constellations and the way that one in particular is special for the winter nights.  If you are out in northeast America and can see Orion, it is certainly crisp and cold.

Missing Silas chills my soul.  Each of those stars are huge, hot suns, but I cannot feel any of their massive warmth.  Very soon now that piercing and familiar constellation will begin to peek over the horizon, and I don't know how I'm going to handle that.  They were supposed to be his special connection to the world, and now it is ours to him.

I'm worried about Friday, but not too much.  I'm sure it will be painful to recognize that a full year has passed without our son, and I am a little terrified of the fact that this is only the first of many, many years we will not have him.  I am certain it will hurt less than what I experienced a year ago but I should know better than to be certain of anything.

I looked for Orion last night, but I didn't see it.  Maybe this year it won't appear, and then that will prove I am in a whole other Universe than the one I thought I was inhabiting.  That would be proof of the disbelief I still feel for this World around me.  It wouldn't even surprise me, really.  Just another part of all of this I cannot trust to be correct and true.

Instead of celebrating, we continue to mourn but I'm so good at it now, you can't even tell I'm doing it every day, all the time.  So then Friday is just another day without Silas, unless, of course,  his rising constellation coincides with our drive north into solitude.  How can it not?

Is it faith or belief or religion for me to assume that the Universe will fuck with me any chance it gets?  I always thought we were on pretty good terms.  Healthy respect for the Vast Ineffability of it all mixed with wonder and love and appreciation for Its endless beauty and mystery, but I guess I missed how dark and deep the Mystery part goes.  Because I am very fucking mystified by how much this sucks.

I have to hold back anger when I have to let people know exactly what I am not celebrating, but then I remember there's nothing they can do for me anyway, so why bother?  I'm surprised by the number of people that seem to have forgotten.  But then I have also been surprised with unexpected cards and gifts and kind words from so many people who do remember him, and do understand how sad we remain.

The people that remember and acknowledge Silas, the people that hold him and us in their hearts, they are carrying us along, and we thank you all for your love and support.  We need it so much, especially this week as his stars slip into the night sky and his day passes us by.

~~~~

So then what of it?  Please tell me, how did you do this?  Where can we find solace?  What possible actions or words or thoughts can make Friday bearable?  Or is Unbearable the only way through? 

Is that Me you're talking about?

"Is she drunk?" and Alicia whispers back, "I think she was drinking in her room before dinner."

::snip::

All through dinner Lucille has been careening wildly from sadness to elation to despair . . . But as we sit down and begin to eat dessert, she breaks down and sobs silently, her shoulders shaking, her head turned away as though she's going to tuck it in under her wing like a sleeping bird.

::snip::

"What's wrong with your mom?" he asks as I carefully arrange myself next to him, trying not to get stabbed by my dress.

"She's manic-depressive."

"Has she always been?"

"She was better when I was little. She had a baby that died, when I was seven, and that was bad. She tried to kill herself. I found her."

-- The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger

I should probably recuse myself here because I am one of the few people on earth who didn't like "The Time Traveler's Wife." But the point remains the same: I was somehow so completely unsurprised to find out that the drunk-by-dinner emotionally vapid and over-reactive mom of the protagonist had a skeleton in her closet: a skeleton of a baby, that is.

What is it with images of mothers who've lost children in popular culture?

I'm sure in my lifetime I've run across this trope a million times between books, the movies, and the television, and yet for the life of me I can't remember many of them that I encountered prior to my own loss. Dead babies were simply a plot device or (as above) character development -- a throw-away line that explained someone's depression or alcoholism or emotional instability. "Ahhh," I can hear myself saying as I read the line, and then moved on to become engrossed by the story's main theme. Now I feel as though I'm a magnet for these storylines, and depending on my mood, and their presentation, my reaction to these literary doppelgangers has been decidedly mixed.

For some fiction, dead babies and children make great plot devices: it's a crime, a mystery, a turning point. A grief-laden springboard from which the rest of the story flows, a sometimes hidden/sometimes overt source of guilt, a crux in a relationship between parents. Recently and notably, there's been "The Rabbit Hole" (an acclaimed play which revolves around parents coming to terms with the death of a 4-year old who ran into traffic) and "Antichrist" (starring Willem Dafoe as half of a grieving couple, whose young child fell out of a window while unattended, apparently because they were next door having a moment, if you catch my drift). (Disclosure: I have not had the wherewithall to watch either of these two productions.) There's at least one recent "Law & Order" depicting a nutty babyloss mom and a few older ones with dead babies as centerpieces; and there's an MI5 from a season ago where a infant-napping goes awry and parents wind up mourning as the mystery unfolds. As many of you are now aware, the first twenty minutes of Pixar's "Up" include a poignant passing reference to either infertility or miscarriage -- a precursor to the balloons uprooting the house and the adventure unravelling as it does. I'm sure there are countless medical dramas that use this riveting ploy, but I stopped watching those two and half years ago. Too close.

Then there's child loss as character development. Think of the quiet, introverted grief-stricken father -- teetering on divorce, by the way -- who spends his life trying to travel and yet not escape the comforting cocoon of his home in "The Accidental Tourist." You just want to hug him, he looks so sad, and eventually Geena Davis does (apparently his grief just needed some fun-time crayzee!). Or another set of parents, in a movie featuring nothing but a relationship, attempting to channel their grief and save their marriage in "Ordinary People." These are "accidents" that happen to "ordinary" parents -- and we're left watching what we assume would be an everyperson, every family type of reaction.  This could happen to me; I hope if it does I find a fun Geena type chick to help me out of it.  Somehow circumscribing these people by grief makes all the sense in world -- or does it?

Sometimes the personality conclusion from babyloss is a real head-scratcher. In the TV series "Damages," Glen Close deliciously plays Patty Hewes, an evil lawer who eventually is revealed to have a violent streak, especially in regards to one of her young, female employees. In the waning minutes of the season one finale, the mystery explaining Patty's personality is finally unveiled: Her baby died. What are they trying to tell me here? Did she miss her dead daughter, who perhaps would now be around the age of her new hiree with whom she has an intense love/hate(/murderous) relationship? Or was she just fucking nuts thanks to grief? The camera passes over a gravestone, backs up to show Glen Close kneeling over it with tears flowing, and then cuts to a flashback in a hospital where things go horribly and vaguely and fuzzily wrong.   We, the viewers, are suddenly meant to understand her -- and an entire season of her icy, bitchy, wild, calculating, sociopathic and homicidal character -- completely. Just like the mom in "Time Traveler's Wife", where with a few throw-away words we're to summarize her identity, her character writ large. And it's not pretty.

What does this all say about me? Where does society (or the literary half) think I'm headed? For divorce? A murderous rampage? The bottle? Hot sex in the woods with Willem Dafoe?

:::

Maybe babyloss is more common than I'm giving it credit for: maybe it really is widespread, hidden beneath the weeds, and all of these authors and television programs are simply stating the obvious, what happens all the time and what everyone knows. Maybe this is the publicity we all need.

Recently In the New York Times Magazine, Gina Bellafante wrote about the novels of Jodi Picoult, and how they all seem to center on children undergoing great peril. Picoult is a best-selling author whose books have spawned movies -- but why? Why does she use this outline, and why on earth are people interested in reading it?

I remarked what a miracle it is that any child survives to the age of 6, given the exposed outlets, tumbling kitchen knives and thousand quotidian threats that are, in a new parent’s mind, colluding toward an entirely opposite outcome. Picoult laughed in sympathy. “You can’t make your kids wear helmets, you just can’t do that,” she told me. The real dangers are, of course, the ones we can’t (or refuse to) anticipate.  

So that's it. Point out the stuff I may not have thought of, expand my horizons. Is that what I am to everyone around me, the one who makes them realize and understand danger? To remind them that bad stuff comes from nowhere and can happen to anyone? And what does the reader take away from countless books highlighting a mother's worst fears?

“Maybe the average reader is not facing the daily challenges of a mom whose child is dying of cancer, for example, but she probably had an argument with her teenager that morning about something inconsequential that left her feeling frustrated and certain there’s no middle ground between them,” she told me. Picoult said she hoped in some sense that her books were the way to that middle ground.

Middle ground? Is that what me and my story represent to the general public? I'm wondering here if Picoult means "perspective" ("Things aren't so bad! We could be treating my kid for cancer!") or "gratefulness" ("At least my child is alive to fight about things like her skirt being too short!"). I would like to think that parents around my neighborhood think about me when they begin yelling at their teenagers, and slowly come to understand some nuance about appreciating life, and taking control of what you can. But frankly, I think Picoult is probably a best-seller because Americans love a car-wreck. They love sitting in fear for a brief moment, and knowing it's a fiction and not happening to them or someone they love. According to some of the anonymous comments on our blogs, some people like absorbing stories of woe and figuring they would handle it differently, or better.

That, I fear, is what I represent to many.  Alcoholics and sociopaths.

:::

I watched last season's "Dollhouse" feeling simultaneously insulted as a woman, and mystified that Joss Whedon could come up with this stuff on a weekly basis. In short, the series follows men but mostly women who are confined in a spa-like building (after signing contracts, though the pressure to sign is questioned) for a period of years during which time their memories and identities are erased. When they're needed for a "job," (usually a callgirl-slash-adventure type gig) an imprint is placed into their heads of the person/-ality they are to be for that particular job. Tension mounts throughout the season as bits and pieces of the Dolls' past flit through their consciousness. In one episode, the Dolls retain their original identities for a a few hours, and with those some of their residual memories. And one Doll -- a female sub-character -- stumbles across a baby carriage and says bewildered, "I had a baby."

"Just watch," I immediately said to my husband on the couch next to me, "her baby's dead."

Sure enough, minutes later, we find her stumbling into a graveyard to recall the death of her child. And this is why, we are left to connect the dots, she agreed so wholeheartedly to signing over her identity and memories for a period of years, never to think of them, the baby, it. To escape the grief, to escape her. To enter a mini coma. To forget (even temporarily) that horrible day or event. To let that ubiquitous Time, pass.

Strangely, that bit of character I got completely. 

Where have you stumbled across babyloss parents in popular culture?  How were they depicted?  Did you find the plot device or character development that ensued to be familiar or unrealistic?  How did it make you feel?

signs signs everywhere signs

'Is there someone you have who can spot your warning signs?'

'Sorry?'

'Is there anyone who you talk to. Someone who will notice any signs.'

'Can you give me an example?'

I knew exactly what she was talking about, but I wanted to make her say it out loud. I wanted to hear how she would articulate that the emotions I consider normal cohorts to grief are what she considers 'warning signs'.

I had explained upon arrival at her office that I was finished my prescription and was not planning on refilling it. Her first words?

'Oh. Oh, my.'

Ah. Signs.

WARNING: SHE IS LOOKING SAD TODAY.
WARNING: SHE APPEARS TO BE FEELING A LITTLE ANTISOCIAL.
WARNING: LET’S GET HER BACK ON THE DRUGS, IMMEDIATELY.

---

'You mentioned your temper before. And crying often.'

In my mind: ‘OH MY GOD Lady. THAT’S what you call signs? Then I’m fucking CERTIFIABLE, with or without the antidepressants.’

In reality: 'My husband and I are close. My mother and I are close. I have a good friend here now.'

‘That’s good. They’ll know you well enough to spot the signs.’

Next I tried in vain to describe the physical side effects I’d been suffering from over the previous 48 hours since stopping because frankly, I was pretty freaked out. I was dismissed, albeit in a very polite manner.

---

Walking home from my appointment, I realized with a shiver that my bare legs and flops would soon go the way of the closet in order to make room for tights and boots and English wind and rain. Why hadn’t I noticed the temperature two hours earlier? Was it the same reason I forgot to open the window for the dryer exhaust? Or why I left the milk out all day?

I imagined with the seasons changing that I might have an embroidered toque I could pull on, serving the dual purpose of alerting anyone to the difference between these infamous signs and a banal annoyed mood resulting from a hard day at work.

It could be white, with pink letters sewn in. And reversible!

On one side: BAD DAY & BITCHY

And the other: DEAD BABY MAMA

How's that for a sign?

---

I've had to take two days off from work this week after finishing my last pill over the weekend. I'm dizzy; really fucking emotional. I feel dopey and foggy and have tried unsuccessfully too many times to count to describe the weirdo tracer vibe I've got going on. Every blink feels as though it's taking me three steps further than I'd intended. Does that even make sense? I guess I'm Coming Down.

Is there a rehab for this kind of situation? Cause believe me, I'd love to go. Three weeks would be perfect. Goodbye world: I'm taking a well earned breather.

In the end, Doc's only explanation was 'heightened awareness'. I've been dulled profoundly around the edges for almost a year now, leveled out by a magical chemical concoction that has kept me on a relatively even keel.

Don't get me wrong - as opposed as I was to antidepressants in the beginning - my opinion has changed completely. I was several months into our loss when I saw Christmas on the horizon and started to lose my shit all over again. I couldn't cope. I sought medical intervention. It helped - no question. I just wish I'd known how profoundly and physically I'd be affected by the removal of said chemicals from my system.

So far, I'm hanging in there. Five days in, one tentative step at a time.

I am 100%, honest-to-goodness, wholeheartedly of the Whatever Works for You camp. I can't say with certainty I won't go back to this form of help in the future. But right now, fulfilling the promise to myself of weaning back to my 'natural state' (HA, I know) within a year is important to me. The idea of another pregnancy this year plays a huge role in my decision, of course. But more than anything, right now I just need to follow through on ONE thing. With my most basic self.

I worry minute to minute how my revived and heightened awareness will affect my progress in moving forward. How will I cope, just me?

Only time will tell.

.::.

Have you had experience with antidepressant since your loss?  Have they helped you? If so, would you mind sharing what led you to the decision, and whether or not you've decided to continue?