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.

In plain sight

"And after that, I figured out that any name that comes from Hebrew will indeed be the same in both English and the Old Country language..."

I had just explained how hard it was to find a name for Monkey, what with all the constraints we had imposed-- one of them being that the name sound the same in the two languages that were to be native to her,-- and the after that in the sentence was strategic. Deliberate. And painful. Out to dinner with JD's colleague from two jobs ago and her husband, lovely people, about 23-24 weeks along with their first now. I'd never met her before, and neither of us has ever met the husband. She got back in touch with JD recently, on one of those professional social media networks, and a few messages into the exchange suggested dinner.

I didn't lie. But I did obfuscate. The after that hid the stories of both of my sons' names. The realization came during A's pregnancy, after combing through piles of books and countless online pages. When he died, still nameless, the top two candidate names were from Hebrew. We picked one of them, the one we were leaning towards anyway, before he was born.

When we found out the Cub was also a he, I just wanted to go back to that Hebrew name well. JD wanted to look wider. In the end, we came back to it, and found one that couldn't have been more perfect for the Cub as an individual, but also for remembering and honoring his brother.

The after that covered that whole story. Or maybe it contained it, but it felt more like it was covering. And it was only one of about five times that evening JD and I didn't lie about our middle child, but neither did we invoke him out loud. At one point, the story of JD's best friend from childhood came up, the friend who died tragically young, and in whose honor we were looking for a name that started with an "A" for our son. This last part? We didn't bring it up. I think that was the point in the evening when I stared at the table for a while, missing my son and feeling shitty.

I unloaded, some, on the way home. They are lovely people, and we ended the evening with plans to keep in touch and to meet up again in a bit. And along with the sadness and the missing, the mastery with which the both of us, in perfect concert and without previous agreement, carefully sidestepped any mention of A was bugging me.

"Well, did you think we should've talked about him the first time we see them, and with her being pregnant?" JD asked.

And that's the rub. I like them, see. And they are just starting to form this image of us, the image I know is incomplete because, duh-- they think we have two children. I am not ashamed of my dead son. I love him, and I don't want to hide him. There was a time when I wanted everyone to know that he existed, that he was loved, that he is still loved. Now I have come to a place where when casual acquaintances don't know about him, I don't sweat it. These people though... Did I mention that they are lovely? And that we will likely see them again? So yeah... I want them to know.

I could get on my public policy high horse right now and talk about how health care providers should talk a lot more about dead babies, and about how if that was the case it probably wouldn't feel like talking about my dead son to a pregnant woman I am seeing for the first time is verbotten. But public policy isn't the point here. The point, I think, is that as things stand it didn't feel right to talk about him, but neither did it feel right not to.

And so I will say here what I said that night to JD-- we did the best we could in that particular situation, but I think I get to be sad about it.

If it's been a while for you, what do you want people you meet now to know about you? What do you want them to know about your reproductive history? If you are at the beginning of this journey, looking forward (if you can) what do you think you will want people you meet in a few years to know?