headless

photo by sherrattsam.

I have this itty bitty Buddha. It is made of some kind of soft white clay. My friend brought it back after a South Pacific tour in the Navy. His R&R involved visiting Thailand. He climbed the stairs to a Buddhist monastery one morning, he told me on his first night back. We stared at each other over bourbon and cigarettes. "The sun was coming up. I never meditated in my life," he said, "but I sat still and focused on my breath, like you said. Then I thought I could smell you there, across the world." Maybe we were a little bit in love back then, even though we strictly were not in love. That morning, he wanted to come home, he explained. Instead he bought the Buddha for me. He brought Thailand to me because I brought home to him, he said. It is three-fourths of an inch high. A wee thing. I used to put it on odd places, like the space between my television and my table, since it slide in right under the screen. Sometimes I would put it behind a book, or on my coffeepot, or in my medicine cabinet between the bandages and the hydrocortisone cream.

When he was first shipped off to Iraq, I thought that I understood impermanence. When he came back, I thought I understood karma. It wasn't until my daughter died that I realized I understood nothing.

The itty bitty Buddha is an intricate, beautiful, sacred thing to me. Full of contradictions and comforts. I protected it in the way we protect gifts from eras of our lives. A few years ago, when I had just become a parent, my one year old nephew came to visit, and bit the head off my little Buddha. I didn't watch him do it, but after he left, I found my decapitated bodhisattva knocked over, his head on the floor. And when I inspected the body, one tiny tooth marked the spot where his death writ. The boy, like a little Godzilla, snatched up the body of my guru. ROWR. He screeched in a little one year old way. Then he bit the head off, spat it on the floor, ROAR, I stomp your villag...ooo look, blocks.

Or at least, that is the scene in my head, like I said, I didn't witness it.

I keep the Buddha headless. An ironic reminder of impermanence and death and all those things I no longer need to be reminded of since my daughter died inside of me. The tooth mark is worn away, and the boy who gave it to me (he was really just a boy then too) also worn away. More people ask me about the headless Buddha now than before when it was just a miniature Buddha with its head. I wonder if a broken thing become more powerful by it brokenness.

I have been thinking of gluing the head back on the Buddha. I no longer want to make sweeping statements about the nature of impermanence, I just want everything to be whole again. I just want to be whole again.

+++

I have lain, looking into a basket, waiting for the blade to drop. They told me she was dead, and then pushed my head forward gently.

Now, wait until your head falls into the basket. You will birth her, then hold her, then give her to a stranger who will burn the body. The stranger won't wrap her in orange, nor bless her soul into another life. We won't throw dust on her and whisper, 'Ashes to ashes.' We won't set her in a kayak and set it ablaze out to sea with the other Vikings. We will take her to a sterile room, undress her. We will look for an answer and we won't find one. We will take her to a house, and they will burn her there. Her soul isn't here anymore, so you don't have to worry. We do this sort of thing all the time. She is taken delicately, cleanly away. We will baptize her head, then take yours, if you'd like.

Yes, please.

You won't notice it happening. You will be all heart. It will hurt that way--to feel and not think--but you will learn more than you can absorb with your head. Later, when you have had enough, we will glue your head back on your body. Your head may always face slightly east, or right, or just a little off-center.

I want my head to always face forward.

It is not possible. You were guillotined. You don't bounce back from such a thing. It is important to follow the protocol here of always being slightly crooked. All the cashmere turtlenecks, the expensive silken scarfs, the fox stoles--the fancy, delicate, dead things you wrap around the scar--may not make it any less noticeable. Perhaps that will make it even more so.

I think I want to keep my head.

Of course you do. You are attached to it. But it has not served you well. I can assure you that you were using it marginally at best. You won't miss it nearly as much as your daughter. Losing your head will seem rather inconsequential in the long run. Perhaps you should go headless for a while before we talk about sewing your head back on. Remember that is the true sense of impermanence--to lose a thing you didn't know you had to begin with. Now look down. This won't hurt a bit.

Does the concept of impermanence resonate with you more deeply now? Or did it always? How do you relate to others who seem attached to things that seem so impermanent? Do you feel more head or heart right now? What part of you did you lose with your child? Your head? Your heart? Your vocal cords? Your soul?

Odds and Ends in the Galaxy of Grief

Grief washes over me.

It is not the same grief, not like it was almost four years ago. It is not the same at all, but it is still grief.

In its barest form, can grief be anymore than a wish for what once was? A desperate and primordial wish to return to what was? A return to a place that is safe and comfortable. Tragedy, perhaps, forces us to inhabit a skin we do not think of as our own.

We find ourselves looking at the new us, pink and raw, fragile and still broken, and we are perplexed. Angered. Bewildered. We scratch at the new skin, convinced the old is still somewhere underneath. Time goes by and we at least become more accustomed to it. No more do I catch sight of myself in the mirror and wonder who that woman is, with the frazzled hair, nails bitten down into the quick. She does not smell of the un-showered, dressed in dingy browns and greys.

And then, suddenly, I catch sight of myself, my circumstances, my life in a new light. The suddenness of it is mystifying.

I cleaned out the bathroom cabinet last week, prior to beginning my big renovation.

A lifetime's full of  the accoutrements of pregnancy attempts. The ovulation predictor kits. Empty bottles of fertility drugs. Pregnancy tests. Sperm safe lubricant. The pads I use when I miscarry.

Each of them an entire constellation of feelings and emotions. Galaxies of hope and despair, dragging me right back in.

I protest. I protest mightily, I am not that person. I am not that woman. I am not the beleaguered mother of dead children. I try to dig in my heels, but what is mere woman against the physics of galaxies.

I sit on the floor of the bathroom, agreeing to be in that space again. I sit and think about the first tube of pre-seed, what I thought was the answer to all of our fertility woes. I look at the dosage of the drugs and try to track them back to another appointment and another protocol - was this year 2? Year 3? 

I think of the futility of OPK's, displayed by the variety of manufacturers represented. I think of that nurse, the one who smirked when I quietly spoke up. "Para 4, gravida 1. It's just that he died thirty minutes after he was born. My son. His name was Gabriel."

She didn't get it either.

She, like so many, looked at the skin stretched over me, wrinkled and scarred, and she turned her head.

I turn my head too.

I walked away from all of this, I walk away from all of this. I sigh and stand up, sweeping it all into a black garbage bag. All of it. Great handfuls of my hopes and dreams, armfuls of despair and sadness. All of it, into one black garbage bag.

I haul it out of the house with leftover bits of tile and paint chips and packaging from the new bathroom mirror.

I am not her.

Standing on the back deck, my sides heaving from the pull of that galaxy.

This is grief.

This is what catches you, suddenly, as you mind your own business.

This, the reminder, that skin you wear now, it was not always so.

Does this definition of grief seem to ring true for you? Have you been surprised by how grief can catch you when you were least expecting it? How far are you from your loss and are you better equipped to handle these surprises? What have you learned to cope with them? Are you getting comfortable in your new skin?

The Sound and the Fury

I am a sharp and pointed thing. My tongue is quickly poison-painted. Fighting talk? My words are weapons, and I’ve used them to wound. There is a cruel satisfaction in leaving a barb in an opponent’s tender places.

I am not proud of this. But it is my truth.

photo by sedeer

Over time, I have learned to wrap my rage in cooling sheets and camomile. Now I am a real-life-card-carrying-grown-up-woman-lady-with-responsibilities I practice caution. Hurting people is not Nice, you see. It is Unkind. I want to be loving and nurturing and other good things. I believe in Kind. ‘Kind,’ I say to my living children, ‘be Kind.’ That’s the most important thing, to be Kind.

But sometimes all becomes hot. My rage bubbles and boils. Kind evaporates rapidly, and all that’s left is the salty residue of Mean. And that’s when I unleash the wicked tongue. And it is merciless.

I often thought that grief would make me good. But it has just made me more of who I am. Damn it.

I see a counsellor. We talk about the Mean. We talk about the way that seems to be the essence of me when all the rest is boiled away. We talk about a special, stop-shouting-at-hapless-acquaintances strategy.

‘TRY THIS’ she says (she is very loud my counsellor)

‘WHEN SOMEONE DOES SOMETHING THAT YOU FIND UNACCEPTABLE, THINK “ASSERTIVE” NOT “AGGRESSIVE.” YOU SIMPLY FRAME IT LIKE THIS:

‘WHEN YOU.... ‘(insert description of provocative behaviour. Note I said  description. Not judgement)

‘I FEEL .....’ (insert feeling. It is OK to have feelings. It is OK to name your feelings. But do not blame.)

‘NEXT TIME I WOULD PREFER THAT YOU....’ (give a suggestion or a solution. Something constructive.)

‘Thank you so much’ I say ‘What a delightful and pleasant way to interact. That would be a better way to deal with my rage. I shall try it as soon as I am given the opportunity.’

And so, I do. And in situations that do not involve dead babies, I promise you I am being the MOST constructive, assertive, shiny-eyed Kind person I can be.

But then...

But then...

Then all becomes hot. My rage bubbles and boils. Kind evaporates rapidly and all that’s left is the salty residue of Mean.

‘WHEN YOU...  appropriate someone else’s dead baby tragedy to illustrate what a heroic, selfless paragon of virtue you are for taking round a frozen lasagne once and then never speaking to them again...’ (Judgmental, moi?)

‘I FEEL... like stabbing this pencil up your nose and into your brain.’ (What? I’m just naming my feelings.)

‘NEXT TIME I WOULD PREFER THAT YOU... did not bring the worst of yourself to dance all over the most painful part of my heart, but rather fucked off and bothered someone else with your solipsism.’ (Well... it IS a suggestion. They don’t HAVE to do it.’)

And there I am. Mad mama of a lost baby. Raging, raging at an unfair world where lasagne doesn’t make it better and all the assertiveness training I could have won’t take that that salty Mean away.

Are you angry in your grief? Do you ever boil over, or does your rage simmer quietly? What soothes your temper, and where can I get some?

Silas' Season

It creeps up on me like the shadow of his absence.
I feel him first as a whisper breeze that cools a hot late summer day.
When a leaf leaves the tree, I fall with it
into piles of grief on the curb.
The suddenly incessant crickets every single night:
Exactly like his name in my head,
every single night.
The days tighten, losing light
as my heart constricts in anti-anticipation.
That moon, that September night, her labor and pain.
One by one, the leaves arrange into place.
The moon eases in its orbit.
The Universe rings my soul like a broken bell
when that perfect autumn eve
exactly captures the essence of the day he was born.
I cannot stand it once again
and once again I cannot move aside from the
drenching, gusting, cold fall storm
that is my face and heart and soul and hands
when his birthday is here
and he is not.

I have to settle for the fall.  For the piles I drive through.  For the crickets that sing their vigil.  For the cleansing rains.  For the chill of our loss on the last bits of summer heat, and the cold nights ahead where we have to hold each other close and let the spark of our souls keep his memory warm in our beautiful and broken hearts.

What does the season of your loss look and feel like?  Has it changed the way you view that time of year entirely?  Or are there other non-seasonal triggers that remind you of the day you lost your child?  And please feel free to offer a poem of your own, if you like.

Who was that?

When Catherine W. came into this community, I found her comments here and there, nestled amongst the others. Her insight and the haunting beauty of her words blew me away, and I wanted to know more of her story. It unfurled, moment by moment, through the months. Then, as though my prayers were answered, she began writing her blog Between the Snow and the Huge Roses. I think I speak for many of us when I say that it was as though her words were always here within us and around us, like the Poet Laureate of the Heartbroken. Her girls were born so early at just over 23 weeks, given impossible odds. One survived. One did not. She writes about that liminal place between lucky and unlucky, grieving and rejoicing and the intersection of all those emotions at the same time. I hope you join me in welcoming Catherine, as a regular contributor to Glow in the Woods. --Angie

One thing love and death have in common, more than those vague resemblances people are always talking about, is that they make us question more deeply, for fear that its reality will slip away from us, the mystery of personality.

From Swann’s Way -  Proust

I have to confess that I have not read any of the seven volumes of Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time.’ I don’t expect I will ever read anything that comes in seven volumes; life is short and time’s a-wasting. But my eye caught upon this quote in an interview with the novelist Francisco Goldman about his most recent book, Say Her Name. It is a semi-fictionalised account of the unexpected death of his young wife, Aura, in a freak surfing accident.

He summarised. The fundamental questions in death are: who was that person? Where did that person go? Who was that? And in love, it is the same: why does this one person, out of all the millions on the planet, suddenly merge with me so I effectively want to be her all the time? Why does this one person so enthral me? What is it? What was that? Who was that?

My mind, as it tends to when questions of love and death arise these days, immediately jumps to my daughter. Whose personality was, perhaps, more of a mystery than most.

When I have mourned the death of an adult, I have felt the tug of the specific. The particularness, the peculiarities of that person. And, when they have left, the question hangs in the air: who was that? I mull over characteristics and search through memories. With time, I have often gained some degree of resolution to that pivotal question, at least a partial answer.

But three years after my daughter’s death, this question is still keeping me up at night. Scratching my head in bewilderment. Wondering. Who was that?

photo by quinn.anya

My daughter. My half made girl. Whose brief life was so tentative and flickering.  Supported by whirling, whispering machines that gasped and kept time for her. This person who I am so in love with that I have tried over and over to inhabit her body, to live her short life. Imagined myself into that plastic box. Sometimes I even feel that it was me lying there, our identities have become so confounded.

Who was that? This person for whom I have been in mourning for nearly seven times as long as she ever lived. Already disproportionate according to some. But I suspect that multiplier is only going to increase. 

My husband and I were the only mourners at our daughter’s funeral and we were early.  We walked around the outside of the crematorium before the service. There were labelled spaces around the pathway, for the flowers that we hadn’t thought to bring. A space had been laid out for ‘Baby Georgina W.’ I couldn’t help wondering why she needed a qualifier.  Nobody else being cremated there that day had a preface. No middle aged man Joe Bloggs, no teenage girl Jane Doe. Only their names. But the babies, they all had that descriptor, a capitalised Baby, pinned to their fronts.

This type of loss has a nomenclature all of its own. It has qualifiers. Not just simple death. Miscarriage. Stillbirth. Neonatal death.  A different brand of death.  I still can’t decide if these terms are dismissive, diminishing, acting as a kind of Death Lite, or if they indicate that a death so very terrible has occurred that it needs to be somehow singled out. Death Ultra Ultra Heavy – handle with caution and step away as quickly as you can, thankful that this one isn’t yours to deal with.

Because the mystery of personality, the question ‘who was that?’ has a slightly sharper edge to it when a person whose life was very brief is under consideration. Sometimes I think the world at large cannot decide whether the loss of a baby is rendered insignificant by the brevity of their lives. Or made even more tragic, rendering the whole topic taboo.

That sigh, the exhalation that often comes when I add the qualifier ‘at three days old’ to the opening statement ‘my daughter died.’ That sound of relief that always seems to say to me, “oh phew, three days old, well that’s ok then. That is not as bad as the death of a three year old. Or of a thirty year old.”

Those words that so many of us have heard, “it’s not as though you knew her.” From the mouth of my doctor, a few weeks on, “It’s not as though you lost your husband. It could have been so much worse.” But he neglected to mention how to quantify the difference between husband death and daughter death and I was too sad to ask.

I ask, who was that? They say, why do you even ask that question, you couldn’t possibly know the answer.

My daughter’s life was very short and brutal, existing between the hazy ground of late miscarriage and the shadowy life sustained by maximal intensive care. A few short months in my womb, where I had barely started to feel her movements, followed by three days in the desperate world of the NICU.  My husband and I sat, craning forward over the desk, foolishly eager and optimistic, opposite the hospital consultant. He gently explained that there was nothing more that they could do, it was time to stop.

As she was dying, I felt I knew her in a way that I have never known anyone else. Perhaps because her entire life was spooling out in front of me, nearing its completion.  But I felt that she was not only the premature infant, dying in my arms. Her corporeal form shed away and she was simply . . . herself. At all ages and at no age at all. Looking back, I’m not sure how much of this experience was fuelled by post partum hormones and shock. But, at the time, I felt we had met. In a way that I have still not met either of my living children and, perhaps, never will. I hope that I will not see their lives complete, come full circle, as I did their sister’s. Time stretches their limbs and works on them, changing them inexorably and mercilessly. But not on her. The child who is, simultaneously, both the eldest and the youngest in the family.

In other circumstances where I have felt determined to get things right, to respond correctly, to inhabit the moment, weddings, birthdays, surprises, I have felt a veritable agony of self consciousness. And death is one situation where there is no ripping up and starting again. I was going to hold my daughter, just once. She was going to die, just once. And everything I had to say to her, everything I could hope to glean about her, everything I would ever know about her, well, that was the hour. It should have felt terribly pressurised. But, as my daughter slowly died, observed by strangers, I held her. And, amidst that strange calm, I felt that I knew her.

Do you ever ask, 'Who was that?' How do you answer that question? In what ways did you feel like you knew your baby(ies)? Or do you cringe even thinking about that question? Does it feel impossible to truly know a baby? How has that affected your grief and the ways you see your baby?