amnesia

Counting the months on my fingers – November, December, January – I realize that it’s been more than a year and a half since the twins died. That's a long time, but, apparently, not quite long enough. When I sum up what I've been doing since it happened, I decide that, mostly, I've been trying to teach myself to forget.

Back when I started my blog, a commenter named Julie suggested that I take a look at the end of Deuteronomy 25, pointing to the verses about the Amalekites, a tribe who attacked the Jews following the exodus from Egypt: Remember what Amalek did to you on the way as you came out of Egypt . . . you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven; you shall not forget.

Though Julie had no way of knowing, this was one of the biblical passages that, as children, my brother and I found particularly hilarious. We even developed a whole who's-on-first routine about it.

--Remember, one of us would say, you need to blot out their memory.

--Blot out whose memory? the other would ask, eyebrows scrunched in mock confusion.

--You know who.

--Just remind me.

--You need to forget the Amalekites. The Amalekites. The A-mal-e-kites, Forget the Amalekites. Remember to forget the Amalekites.

--Okay. I've got it. I'm forgetting the Amalekites.

Pause.

--Wait. I can't remember. Remind me again. Who was I supposed to forget?

But remembering to forget turns out not to be a contradiction in terms. If you can't erase the past through an act of will, you can obscure it, soften its sharp edges, dim the spotlights, mute the voices. Back at the beginning, when I was terrified that that I'd never be able to escape the words and pictures in my head, I deliberately questioned each of my recollections, cast doubt on every memory as it surfaced. Was I in the hospital for two weeks or three? What did the social worker suggest that I do? After a while, I couldn't be sure. And I feel fortunate that there's no anniversary date for me to dread, because I can no longer remember exactly when they were born.

I realize that many people, most people, perhaps, want something different, want, in fact, the exact opposite. But I sometimes wonder if remembrance causes more pain than it eases. And despite the obvious evidence to the contrary, I tell myself that if I had a way of blotting out all memory of the twins from under heaven, I would do without a second thought.

Here's the thing. Imagine you're on a ship setting sail. For a while you can still decipher the expressions on the faces of the people standing behind you, crowded together on the dock. Eventually, though, the expressions, the faces, the people, and the dock itself shrink, blur, run together. More and more, your attention turns to the grey sky and the greyer water in front of you. The waves curl white and you take out a chart and run your finger across it. On shore, everyone is eating dinner at their own tables in their own houses. The dock is empty and no-one is watching, wondering if it's really true that the tips of the sails are the last part of the ship to vanish beneath the horizon. Even if you looked back, there would be nothing to see.

collateral damage

I know that Mother's Day is, for many of us, a difficult day, a day on which we think about our lost children, mourning the fact that we don't seem to count as mothers in the eyes of the world or, perhaps, in our own eyes, mourning the fact that all our children aren't with us. For me, though, Mother's Day has never been about me or my children. Instead, it's a day on which I think about my own mother and mourn the fact that, for reasons I can't quite understand, I'm not with her.

My brother and I always said that no occasion was truly complete until our mother turned to me and said, more in sorrow than in anger, "Niobe, you've ruined my [insert name of holiday]." I ruined so many Mother's Days and birthdays and Fourth of Julys and Thanksgivings and Christmases, that I imagine my mother, as she has brunch today with her other children and step-children, taking a certain grim satisfaction at the idea that, on this Mother's Day, I'm sad because I'm thinking of her.

I've never been able to explain what made things so difficult between me and my mother. Different temperaments, perhaps. Or because my childhood coincided with a long run of turbulent years for her. Or because she disliked and resented her own mother. But, for whatever reason, it seemed that I could never be what my mother wanted me to be, could never do what my mother wanted me to do. We were always fighting and I always lost. No matter how angry I got, my mother could always get angrier and she held the trump card. I loved her and I couldn't be sure if she really loved me.

When I was thirteen, during the chaos that followed my mother's second divorce, I decided to go live with my father and his family, and left, taking my little brother with me. My mother didn't speak to me for six months. She remarried right away and had a child with her new husband. "Niobe," I remember her saying, "you have to remember that I have another daughter now. I don't need you anymore."

Eventually, I grew up and we came to a truce. We weren't exactly close, but we didn't fight and I called my mother almost every week and, once in a while, spent a weekend at her house. When I was pregnant with the twins, my mother was thrilled. She was going to take a month off from work to stay with me. She called all the time to see how I was doing. I know she was buying baby presents, though I told her not to give me anything until -- until I was sure everything was going to be all right.

When it turned out that everything was not going to be all right, my mother came and visited me in the hospital, talked to me, encouraged me to eat. But even then, I could feel her anger building and, by the time I came home, everything I did made her furious.

I was, she told me as I cried and refused to go outside, wallowing in my sorrow. I spoiled my oldest niece's first birthday party, held a few weeks after the twins' deaths, because I hid in an upstairs bedroom, unable to bear seeing the sister-in-law who was eight months' pregnant. I put too many restrictions on what she said, because I asked her not to talk about my stepbrothers' babies. I wasn't grateful enough for all she'd done for me. Now, a year and a half after the twins' deaths, my mother has refused to see me or speak to me for months.

Now, I'm sure I'm making my mother sound like a monster. But she isn't. Really, she isn't. And I'm sure that if she ever read this post, the story I'm telling would be incomprehensible to her. "That's not the way I remember it," I can hear her saying. But, as I see it, the loss of my mother is, in many ways, the saddest part of the twins' deaths. A stone, dropped into a lake, disappears almost immediately. But the ripples -- oh, the ripples. They etch widening circles until they collide with a distant shore.

Happy Mother's Day, Mom. I love you and miss you and wish I could fix whatever's wrong between us. I hope that by next Mother's Day I'll be able to say that to you.

Please use the comments to let us know where you are -- literally and figuratively -- and what you're thinking about this Mother's Day.

what they say

You'll hear these words again and again, sometimes as a reassurance, sometimes as an explanation, sometimes, it seems, simply as a mantra: "everyone grieves differently."

"Everyone grieves differently," they say, "Oh, yes, everyone grieves differently. You know, everyone grieves differently." They say it, but it isn't true.

Everyone seems to grieve in remarkably similar ways. There's the chasm, the stumble, the stagger, and the fall. There's the cold, the silence, and the dark. There's the shattering, the splintering, the grinding, the rending. There's the strange language in low whispers. There are tears that strangle and tears that scald. There's the chain of words around your wrists, the story worn out by the telling that always ends in exactly the same way.

There's the wearying round of repetition. The first month, the second month, the third month. There's the ever-recurring day as the weeks gain ground. There's the first Christmas, first Easter, first Mother's Day. Then the whole year has gone and the counting begins again, but more quietly this time.

Sometimes there's the stake and sometimes there's the stone, the garden, the poppied field far from the swing of the sea. There's the shadow and the apple blossoms, the thimble and the stitches, the cypress and the yew. Everyone grieves that way. Everyone, it seems, except for me.

"You can't compare pain," they say. But that's not true either.

I lift your grief in one hand, mine in the other. I balance them against each other, gauging their heft. I lay them side by side and measure carefully. Mine always comes up short.

what's in a name

When well-intentioned people ask about the twins' names, I hestitate for a moment, then say, "I didn't give them names." Which is true, as far as it goes. But like most truths, it only goes so far.

As a child, I pored over books listing baby names and their meanings. First, it was to find names for my imaginary future children -- two boys and a girl, I decided -- whose names changed over the years from Alana to Aislinn to Augusta and from Bradley to Brennan to Bartholomew. Later, it was because I liked learning that Deborah meant bee and David meant beloved and Dennis paid homage to Dionysus, the god of wine. And still later, I justified my obsession as a kind of historical/sociological study, as I worked my way through the Social Security website, with its list of the names given to babies born in the US, arranged in order of popularity, for every year back to 1879.

In college, at the very end of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, I read and was haunted by the phrase: stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus. I had barely enough Latin to translate it as meaning something more or less like: all we have left of the rose is its name.

In other words, as Peter Abelard* said, long before I came to vaguely understand it, even after all the roses are gone, we can still say "there are no roses." The name persists even after the thing it names has vanished; we can speak of what is lost and of what never was. Remembrance lives longer than what it remembers.

But when the time came to give names to the twins, I finally saw the double-edged nature of Abelard's words. It was unendurable to contemplate that nothing more than their names would survive, that, for the rest of my life, I would hear the names over and over, and, each time, be reminded with a twisting pain that that was all I had left.

The first twin died before he was born, so, according to the laws of the state where I live, I didn't have to give him a name. The second twin, however, lived for four hours and because of those four hours, she had to have her own birth certificate and her own death certificate. The nurse in charge of providing such information to the bureau of statistics called me again and again as I lay in my hospital bed, doped up with magnesium sulfate and grief. Finally, tearful and exhausted, I told the nurse to just write down her own first name.

A few months later, I took the train to city hall and stood in line with smiling parents carrying babies or pushing strollers. After I finally convinced the dubious clerk that, yes, I needed a birth certificate and a death certificate, I got the official documents and walked out into the cold bright day.

I unfolded the papers, and, for the first time, I read my daughter's name. It was a name I would never have chosen, would never have even considered. It's a name that I never want to see or hear again. But it was the right name, the perfect name, the only possible name. And if you read this post carefully, paying close attention to the empty spaces between the words, you'll find that you already know what it is.

*The 12th centrury philosopher and logician, remembered mostly, if at all, for his affair with his student Héloïse and his subsequent castration by her uncle.

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